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

#241

Post by hannofcart » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:09 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…

> ~10% of GDP from a single country

The 'single' nation you mentioned has many times the GDP of others. 2.15 trillion is most (over 70%) of the fifth largest economy.

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

#242

Post by hannofcart » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:17 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #154

ethbr0 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issues with coal mining are (a) it sucks and is dangerous, (b) therefore, people who do it, or whose families have done it, feel a lot of pride about it, (c) in the US, it's typically located in parts of states that don't have a lot of other employment (Wyoming, Illinois, Pennsylvania, West Virginia). If you're serious about getting rid of coal in the US, it needs to start with "We appreciate your and your family…

Asbestos, AB somehow managed to get over their pride and stop fighting to continue mining asbestos. They’re still proud of the history and hard work that their town represents, but nobody there thinks it would be a better world if they were still digging asbestos out of the ground. (Heck, they finally renamed the town, too. It’s “Val-des-Sources” now.) How the townsfolk there transitioned into that “doing it historic…

Wasn't that brought on by a precipitous fall in demand. I doubt the asbestos miners had any choice in the matter.

In case of coal, there's still _some_ demand though it's on the decline.

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

#243

Post by jebeng » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:37 AM UTC

silasdavis wrote: post #231

labster wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers are plentiful everywhere, yet more bits are mined in SV than anywhere else. Maybe the fact that bit mining expertise is concentrated there is useful to produce more zeroes and ones. I suppose the same might be true of olivine.

> yet more bits are mined in SV than anywhere else Are they?

Yeah, this is almost certainly not the case any way you want to frame the question and define a 'bit being mined'.

You'd really have to twist some strange language to attribute distributed global computation to SV because they may own or have invented certain technologies to even begin to argue that.

Just think of how expensive SV is in general. It doesn't make sense.

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

#244

Post by throwaway0a5e » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

lb1lf wrote: post #226

Gibbon1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old crusty semi-retired engineer I knew said when he was young he liked designing things to close tolerances. But once he was old he found more pleasure in designing things that worked with really shitty tolerances.

-I had a colleague once, fresh out of mechanical engineering at the local univerity college, who as his first project did a locking pawl for a winch drum. Tolerance? H7. The fitters threw a fit trying to make that happen.

Clearly he wasn't working in any sort of mechanical capacity while getting that community college degree.

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

#245

Post by missedthecue » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 1:05 AM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #18

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…

True. Some areas will become uninhabitable or flooded but others will become more habitable (like permafrost/tundra regions). Nature will indeed adapt though there will be reduced biodiversity for a while. Especially because this effect normally happens on a much longer timescale. I think the problem is more that the regions that will become uninhabitable are currently mostly inhabited by people. And often pretty poo…

The climate will change slowly over centuries. People in certain countries won't wake up one morning in 2050 to unihabitable temps and 5 meters of water. It will happen gradually. Because of this, climate migration cannot be compared to wartime migration.

But the key thing to note is that billions of people will move over the next century or two for reasons unrelated to climate. The global population distribution looked different one hundred years ago and it will look different one hundred years hence.

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

#246

Post by AtlasBarfed » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #128

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…

Reducing energy usage is just the slow path to extinction. We’ll never become a multi-planet civilization with that attitude. Also if you believe the science, reducing energy usage won’t meet targets. The developed world will have to go carbon negative over the next couple of decades to counter growing CO2 emissions in the developing world.

What do increases in energy efficiency and terrestrial electricity generation have to do with launching people in rockets? Or have anything to do with "extinction"?

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

#247

Post by astrange » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #186

thechao wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Coal has other externalities besides CO2.

Coal power plants have some of the worst air pollution around on all counts and are terrible for the health of everyone around them.

Or if you need a less relevant but scarier message, they emit more radiation than a nuclear plant.

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

#248

Post by astrange » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #164

thechao wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

The problem is voters, not workers. US voters are significantly older and to the right of employees - either past or near retirement. Improving employment certainly does work on the margins, but in absolute terms there's a lot of people who don't care and just want to be entertained.

Problem number 3 though is the US doesn't emit that much carbon. To be part of a worldwide solution we need to sell carbon capture tech to China and India.

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

#249

Post by mrpopo » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #130

acje wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is not an argument against the solution proposed: > 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. Neither this this: > Are we still trying to solve the problem with the same mindset we created it? I don't know if this solution is at all useful, but climate change is massive threat to a large perc…

> I don't know if this solution is at all useful, but climate change is massive threat to a large percentage of humanity and discarding solutions because you don't like the "mindset" isn't going to get it done.

Climate change is not the only massive threat to a large percentage of humanity, and the mindset that "building large-scale processes with monetary incentives and no after-thoughts needed is good" is what's causing all of them.

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

#250

Post by hedora » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

Useful conversion: At $47/ton, it costs $0.47/gallon of gasoline burnt to capture the CO2 the gasoline would release.

This fact that you divide by 100 to go from ton of CO2 to gallon of gasoline equivalent is a useful coincidence.

It also means that a dollar per gallon gasoline tax for carbon capture would be enough to make cars carbon negative (cars have a lot of embodied carbon; the factor of two covers that).