So you want to build a carbon capture company
91–100 of 180 posts
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#92There are a few areas where I see carbon capture viable: - Catching CO2 of unavoidable CO2 emitting processes, namely burning trash. In Europe we decided that we do not want landfills anymore, and what cannot be recycled has to be burned. We already start with a higher CO2 concentration, and have energy that is created while burning. Seems like a perfect opportunity for catching CO2. - Natural processes that catch CO…
I’m tackling the last one - if anyone’s interested let me know :)
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#93I have an idea about genetically modifying algae to continuously synthesize and excrete cellulose or similar. In theory would only need sunlight and water to operate, and cellulose could sink to the bottom and collected. Anyone knows if this has been explored?
Algae biofuel has definitely been a thing that people have tried over and over again and it hasn’t happened after a few decades so presumably there is some issue with commercialization. Wikipedia claims algae has very high water requirements (>600L of water for 1L of fuel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
Maybe Elon Musk suspects that effective algae biofuel production is a strong candidate for his 100M price, which would benefit SpaceX greatly. Maybe even feasible on Mars, in artificial atmosphere there.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals.
> A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals. Not in itself. When the plant dies, it rots and all the carbon goes back to the atmosphere by the action of fungi and bacteria. Plants can function as the zeroth step in a carbon capture pipeline. The actual capture happens when the plant dies and you bury (or otherwise process) its tissue somewhe…
OTOH, growing plants, turning them into charcoal and sequestering that can be carbon-negative.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#95Armchair strategizing on the topic I know nothing about (but it's fun to think about!):
Constraints:
- C removal requires lots of energy (can't avoid thermodynamics)
- electricity on that scale is either expensive, dirty, or both
Additional concerns:
- cheap/clean energy is intermittent (and still a small percentage)
- excessive electricity is as bad as not enough electricity
Solution:
- build lots of new (safe and cheaper) nuclear power plants
- hook them up to the grid and use them as peakers (!), and using them for C removal on off-times
This:
- provides cheap and clean (from the perspective of C footprint) energy
- solves the intermittency problem of wind/solar
- provides abundant energy for C removal
Assumption: that safe nuclear fission power plants (using Thorium, MSR, .. reactors) are feasible and can be built on the cheap (for some value of "cheap")
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be far more efficient (since additional energy is used for all the actions around it all) to not bring up carbon from below ground in the first place. As long as Norway brings up new oil those actions are just marketing. See the article we are talking about here. First you spend energy to bring up carbon. Then you spend more energy to get it back down again. The math does not check out. Not bringing up the c…
As a Norwegian I agree we should phase out oil sooner. Like you say, not releasing the CO2 to begin with is the best option. However Norway is not the sole oil producer. If demand is not reduced and other producers compensate for our reduction, then that won't really help the planet at all. As such it seems reducing demand would be the best way. Not that easy to achieve on a global scale though, it would seem.
Every Norwegian needs this illusion(Or livsløgn as Ibsen would have said) to sustain the idea of belonging to a nation that is up to something good.
Reality is that Norway is increasingly subsidizing it's oil industry in a way that is not sustainable - especially not economically.
Instead of investing in the future Norway is investing in old dying industries - our Corona package contains almost no investments in sustainable technologies even thought the economy is heading for a hard shock the next time the oil price takes a dive.
Reducing demand and reducing supply both help in getting the CO2 emissions down. A good start would be to just stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#97Trees? am I not seeing the obvious here? A forest sounds nice. Also algae? Eats tons of carbon, generates most of our o2.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#98I have a hunch that there is no artifical process that could possibly compete with what nature already has. The answer is plants. So the solution would be a way to sustainably grow a lot of plants in a short time. But another main factor is the destruction of the densest of those ecosystems, the rain forest on a large scale. That is my answer, stop humans/companies/countries from destroying the rain forest on a large…
This definitely seems the most feasible. Sure, plants aren't particularly efficient, but they're also self-reproducing and self-maintaining, which is a huge bonus.
One interesting approach with plants is to pyrolise them to make biochar - essentially turn them to charcoal. You get a bit of hydrocarbon gas out of them, which you can sell to pay the bills (this is the biggest problem with any carbon capture - there's basically no way to pay the bills), and then you bury the pure carbon that you're left with.
I did a bit of research on this a while back and wrote up the calculations here:https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/biochar
Essentially we'd need to devote quite large amounts of land towards this if we wanted to compensate for our current emissions - something like 66% of the world's forests would need to be periodically cut down, with around 1% cut down and pyrolised each year.
You could probably get some easy wins with existing wood and crop waste - by my estimate we could capture 3% of global emissions just by pyrolising Europe's existing biofuel feedstocks.
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#99I literally don't know anything about those processes beside super basic knowledge. But maybe somebody can explain to me why we can't use something like bio-inspired photosynthesis to extract co2? I bet plants are not co2 throughput optimised. The technology may not be there, but would it be feasible in theory without using too much energy?
plants are nifty little machines, which - while their efficeny might not be optimal - also produce all their parts. Go look at one of the papers doing Re-based CO2-dissociation and shop for the chemicals!
Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company
#100What ever happened to seeding algae blooms by dumping iron in the ocean? That was getting a lot of press several years back.