181–190 of 469 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice work! Are you already on AirMiners? If not, you would fit right in. You're on it with all the replies the thread today...I'm replying opportunistically while sitting by a pool :D
Lucky for some! We're not on AirMiners - will check it out tomorrow. Have to sign off shortly unfortunately but will check back tomorrow for replies. Enjoy that pool!
I get the feeling there's a "snake eating its own tail" aspect here. Assuming carbon sequestration can be done at scale, it will likely require energy, maybe even a lot of energy. So where's this energy going to come from? Well... global energy demand is increasing as-is and the winners are: coal, oil and "natural" gas (which is a fossil fuel): https://www.statista.com/statistics/222066/projected-global-... Even assu…
Next you'd probably build geothermal power stations at a huge scale in iceland or a similarly volcanic places. That power is still cheaper than solar or natural gas by a decent margin.
Nuclear is a contender only if you can find a place willing to let you skip all the red tape and build rather unsafe 1970's designs...
Interesting. The grand prize timeline is 4 years from now. That seems VERY fast. However, I like the aggressiveness- if this can produce viable demonstrations of the technology at anywhere near what the aformentioned Prometheus Fuels ($36/ton) claims, then that produces a huge line in the sand for policy makers on carbon pricing and mitigation. $36/ton would raise the price of gasoline about 36 cents. The cost to cap…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1) Reduce emissions to zero (will take some time). How many centuries is it going to take to reduce global emissions to... Half of their current levels?
Hopefully one century or less? But this depends on global willingness to do so by choosing (more expensive) sustainable products and voting for politicians who want to enforce/encourage carbon reductions
The New Soviet Man was an experiment only 70 years in the making, and it was in no way a successful one.
2. Let's suppose that actually happens. Let's suppose we get to 50% of current emissions in... 50 years.
We currently increase CO2 concentrations by 2.5 ppm/year. This would put us at over 500 PPM in my expected lifetime... In one of the more optimistic interpretations of your predictions.
For bonus points, even if we hit 50% reduction in 50 years, that would way overachieve what the Paris Accord set out. We are currently not on track to hit any of the targets in the Paris Accord.
Reducing amount of CO2 we emit is good, finding a way to capture/convert released CO2 is better, but there is Bezos-level wealth waiting for the person who invents/discovers an actual use for it. I hope this X-prize helps encourage that style of thinking.
I get the feeling there's a "snake eating its own tail" aspect here. Assuming carbon sequestration can be done at scale, it will likely require energy, maybe even a lot of energy. So where's this energy going to come from? Well... global energy demand is increasing as-is and the winners are: coal, oil and "natural" gas (which is a fossil fuel): https://www.statista.com/statistics/222066/projected-global-... Even assu…
Yes, but that doesn't mean we won't need it.
Take air planes. We can't just put batteries in there: too low energy density or something (I'm no physicist, but they won't fly very far is what I gather). But by capturing the CO2 (at exhaust, or atmospherically) that they put out, we can have both airplanes and a stable climate -- assuming it's all done right.
Who wants to have a wind turbine in their back yard? A nuclear power plant? Who lives near that hydro plant in the middle of nowhere? We could instead capture CO2 away from people if power is cheap, before sending the rest down a slightly lossy transmission path.
Driving regular passenger vehicles electrically is definitely less energy intensive than capturing the GHGs that a combustion engine produces, so it would obviously be counter-productive to use capture technology for those sorts of things. But we can use it for other things like chemical processes that produce a GHG as a byproduct where it's hard to capture (new buildings using concrete, for example) or when we don't have the technology to get rid of the emissions.
Right now, the quickest wins are from emission reduction. This capture technology is something we need to have ready for the next phase of keeping our natural habitat stable.
There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…
>For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not even, say you could transform the Sahara to rain forest, awesome right? I mean it would be an incredible feat, but it would give you exactly 0 with reducing carbon. Contrary to popular belief the Amazon rain forest aren't the "lungs" of the planet, the Amazon rain forest is basically net 0.…
Here's my proposal, take that $100M and find a Saudi/Venezuela oil well operator. Give him the $100M in exchange for not pumping $100M worth of oil out of the ground.
I'm curious what people here think about their own role in a prize like this. Are you interested in joining a team? Starting a company? Working on gigaton scale carbon removal? I've been working on carbon removal for the past few years, eager to help anyone who is considering actually making a leap into this industry for their own curiosity or even career. That said there are plenty of other massive juicy challenges…