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So you want to build a carbon capture company

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Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#131

Post by DennisP »

guerrilla wrote: post #111
freddealmeida wrote: post #97

Trees? am I not seeing the obvious here? A forest sounds nice. Also algae? Eats tons of carbon, generates most of our o2.

I can't find the reference but a study I read recently said that afforestation could only satisfy 30% of what we need for carbon removal. Here's a result in Wikipedia that says something similar: > A 2019 study of the global potential for tree restoration showed that there is space for at least 9 million km2 of new forests worldwide, which is a 25% increase from current conditions. This forested area could store up t…

And the direct air capture machines capture about a thousand times as much CO2 for the same amount of land.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#132

Post by ericwaller »

vlovich123 wrote: post #123
wodenokoto wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re so close to saying the solution without getting there. Fast growing plants are probably the most effective carbon extraction we have. Problem is when they die they turn back into CO2. So we should bury those plants before they rot. Our excess CO2 stems mostly from dead plants and animals that have been buried. Seems sensible to put some of our excess back into the ground.

Which requires digging. Which requires machinery at an industrial scale. Which requires large amounts of energy. Which makes it really hard for this to not be in the perpetual motion set of solutions. You’d have to be extracting more carbon than your diggers consume (since even today I don’t think this has electrified and capable of running on solar). Your diggers are consuming concentrated carbon compressed from pla…

I can't speak to any of the details, but this is definitely an interesting approach: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/03/business/running-tide-kelp-ca...

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#133

Post by hh3k0 »

barathr wrote: post #127

If a machine were invented that scrubbed carbon from the atmosphere and turned it into useful food, construction materials, animal feedstocks, and fibers, all while rebuilding topsoil, it would be on the cover of every tech magazine in the world and its inventor would be a celebrity millionaire. Yet I’ve never seen a tree on the cover of Wired. https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab... Sometimes…

> Sometimes we overlook the simplest approaches. We should plant trees. Lots of them. It's not a perfect solution

That's because it's not a solution at all:

https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-c...

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#134

Post by khuey »

rasputnik6502 wrote: post #80
Swenrekcah wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another perhaps even cooler and not so unrealistic that people are actually working on it, is building the solar farms out in space and beaming the energy down to where it’s needed! Edit: OK I looked it up again and there are two stages. The one that's having actual work done is beaming energy between two places on earth, but the space one is being "explored". https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/…

The Sun is beaming free energy to Earth already. If it's not enough then humans should become extinct as a species unfit to live in Solar system

There's value in concentrating the energy so that you don't have to cover the entire planet in solar panels.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#135

Post by Beltiras »

enriquto wrote: post #122
Beltiras wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's carbon-negative even if you don't count the buried carbon due to it being a powerful fertilizing agent.

I don't understand your remark. The plants that you are going to fertilize are part of a carbon neutral cycle anyway. It doesn't really matter if there is a big or small amount of them. The buried stuff is going to rot after a few years and release the carbon back. I think the idea is to bury it to "geological" depths, forever isolated to the biosphere. In the last century, we have burned millions of years worth of p…

Read up on black soil.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#136

Post by [deleted] »

p1mrx wrote: post #68
nosianu wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

It might be possible to pull hydrogen from the ground, leaving the carbon in place. https://proton.energy/ claims to be trying.

[deleted]

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#137

Post by tastyfreeze »

hh3k0 wrote: post #133
barathr wrote: post #127

If a machine were invented that scrubbed carbon from the atmosphere and turned it into useful food, construction materials, animal feedstocks, and fibers, all while rebuilding topsoil, it would be on the cover of every tech magazine in the world and its inventor would be a celebrity millionaire. Yet I’ve never seen a tree on the cover of Wired. https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab... Sometimes…

> Sometimes we overlook the simplest approaches. We should plant trees. Lots of them. It's not a perfect solution That's because it's not a solution at all: https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-c...

Trees alone might not be. However, photosynthesis is the answer. Plants exude sugars and carbohydrates, made from atmospheric CO2, into the soil feeding massive amounts of bacteria and fungi(carbon). The bulk of carbon in the soil comes from plant exudates, not plant matter. As long as this ecosystem is healthy the carbon stays in the soil. When the soil ecosystem is healthy plants are healthier which makes everything up the food chain healthier. The majority of our crop and pasture land soil is dead. The previous year's carbon that was pumped into the soil by plants is released when tilling happens in the spring.

We need to stop tilling and grow diverse, more than 8, species wherever we can.

Five tenants of soil health https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A

NASA CO2 https://youtu.be/x1SgmFa0r04

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#138

Post by tastyfreeze »

wodenokoto wrote: post #85
Aerroon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ecosystem is more or less in a balance. Forests that are cut down will become forests again. Plants already grow pretty much everywhere where they can grow. It's still not enough. We've spent over 200 years pumping carbon into the atmosphere from a source we can't return it to. No amount of growing forests is going to fix this issue without being able to turn those forests into carbon that's in the ground. We nee…

You’re so close to saying the solution without getting there. Fast growing plants are probably the most effective carbon extraction we have. Problem is when they die they turn back into CO2. So we should bury those plants before they rot. Our excess CO2 stems mostly from dead plants and animals that have been buried. Seems sensible to put some of our excess back into the ground.

The majority of carbon in the soil doesnt come from plant matter. It comes from plant root exudates. Plants pump sugars and carbohydrates into the soil to feed bacteria and fungi. As long as we dont poison or till the soil, the ecosystem keeps the carbon in the soil. Some of it will cycle. That is the way it is supposed to be.

Greater than 80% of farm land soil is dead. What little carbon that is built up in a season is released in the spring when the field is tilled.

No till, diverse cover crops, and animals (a complete ecosystem) stores immense amounts of carbon in the soil.

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#139

Post by tuatoru »

cogman10 wrote: post #121
jrnvs wrote: post #112

Burn biomass (plants) in a power plant to generate electricity, then store the carbon dioxide in empty gas fields. This is called BECCS, Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage [0]. Unfortunately, carbon capture and storage is not economical (yet). Let's hope it will be soon, with EU CO2 prices already reaching 50 euros / ton this week [1]. If I understand this International Energy Agency report[2] correctly, many…

Alternative, make charcoal, bury the charcoal, extract whatever useful thing you can from the not-charcol that comes from that process. Charcoal is pretty much pure carbon and that's what we should be putting into the ground. Putting CO2 into the ground runs into problems because you have to deal with the fact that you are burying a gas (gasses don't like to be contained). So skip that, and instead focus on burying p…

Prior art: terra preta[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

Re: So you want to build a carbon capture company

#140

Post by cogman10 »

gonzo41 wrote: post #125
cogman10 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative, make charcoal, bury the charcoal, extract whatever useful thing you can from the not-charcol that comes from that process. Charcoal is pretty much pure carbon and that's what we should be putting into the ground. Putting CO2 into the ground runs into problems because you have to deal with the fact that you are burying a gas (gasses don't like to be contained). So skip that, and instead focus on burying p…

This is a good idea, But getting the biomass will be difficult. I dream about large lakes of algae that can be skimmed and then sundried, and cooked in solar ovens to create essentially a solar powered only capture process. This sort of operation would need a stable cap and trade or carbon tax system to be profitable. I should also add, I think China or somewhere in the hot parts of Africa would be a a good place for…

Pretty much the description of all carbon capture. Capturing carbon is inherently difficult.

IMO, barring some breakthrough, biology will be the most efficient mechanism for capture. Millions of years of evolution have made plants and algae pretty good at carbon capture as the carbon levels slowly depleted (until recently).

An appealing benefit of biological carbon capture is the fact that all biology is solar powered. All the non-biological solutions required a pretty hefty energy input from somewhere. I mean, I guess it's nice that you could provide that from solar/wind/or nuclear. But then it's also nice to not require transmission lines for energy input.

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