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U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#81

Post by oblak »

phtrivier wrote: post #46
oblak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but how would certain entities make tons of money with trees? They wouldn't. And that's why we've been hearing about this nonsense for well over a decade now. It's about making money while pretending they're doing something.

As other commenters pointed out, the other trickiest problem (beyond feasibility and energy requirement) of CO2 removal is that it's not clear who would be paying for them, since you want to sequester the CO2 and not use it. So in the end, it will be either a voluntary deal, or paid by the taxpayers as part of the maintenance of the infrastructure that is earth. Do people make money out of road and bridge maintenance…

Trickiest problem? Not clear who's going to pay for all this? The people are going to pay for all of it and then some. That's the entire point of this operation.

As for the second part of your post: are you playing devil's advocate here? Planting trees, sustainable agriculture - that's not great way to generate fantastic profit at everyone's expense. It's not going to happen any time soon. Sorry for being a nihilistic prick but surely you're not that naive.

We need some kind of agrarian Elon Musk to shake things up while making profit.

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#82

Post by notahacker »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51
dane-pgp wrote: post #2

> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary…

> It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics. So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something…

It's also hard to believe that insurance against theft could ever be less expensive than nobody stealing anything, but that doesn't imply insurance is a fraud to allow people to carry on stealing. We live in a world where theft and carbon emissions are going to happen with or without the blessing of the US government, so if they want to spend some money seeing how far they can mitigate the damage then good.

I'd rather pin my hopes on technological progress than political magic.

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#83

Post by [deleted] »

Sankozi wrote: post #74
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics. So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something…

If you had process that only needs electricity then you run it only when power is cheap (usually when renewables are producing it). Depending on efficiency this could be better solution than energy storage (instead storing energy you pull CO2 and then burn it later if energy is needed).

[deleted]

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#84

Post by stupendousyappi »

dane-pgp wrote: post #2

> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary…

That's based on two very cautious geoengineering approaches that have virtually no negative side effects. If governments were willing to consider other geoengineering approaches, I think that number could be driven down significantly. My favorite candidate is ocean-wave-based olivine weathering, as proposed by Project Vesta. They think that, at scale, that approach could get costs down to $21/ton, plus reduce ocean acidification more effectively too. But it's more complicated and could have some negative effects, such as putting a lot of poisonous heavy metals like nickel in the ocean. But because politicians hate ever having to say that they're knowingly causing any problem, those avenues get starved of research funding, as we see here. But I think that, within 50 years, we're probably going to find a scalable CO2 removal approach for less than half the target cost of this program, and that basically could solve global warming, but because of political cowardice it's discovered 30 years later than it could have been.

Everyone wants to do emission reduction first and delay geoengineering as long as possible, when we should be doing the opposite. Even if the financial cost appears much smaller, it's clear now that large scale emission reduction is politically very expensive. Emission reduction is the clean, ideal solution that we don't have the ability to scalably implement yet. Geoengineering should be temporary quick and dirty approach we use to buy time, creating some problems that last decades in exchange for time to implement a solution for a problem that lasts for millennia. Assuming that cheap geoengineering techniques whose negative side effects are bounded in space and time can be found, but I think that they can.

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#85

Post by AnthonyMouse »

notahacker wrote: post #82
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics. So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something…

It's also hard to believe that insurance against theft could ever be less expensive than nobody stealing anything, but that doesn't imply insurance is a fraud to allow people to carry on stealing. We live in a world where theft and carbon emissions are going to happen with or without the blessing of the US government, so if they want to spend some money seeing how far they can mitigate the damage then good. I'd rathe…

The problem is that it's still political magic.

Suppose it costs $1 to avoid emitting CO2 (e.g. replace gas car with electric car) and $10 to extract the CO2 after the fact. If you get the latter down to $3, you're still upside down. So where does the $3 come from? Presumably a government, but it doesn't even matter. Anyone would still be better off spending that money to subsidize electric cars or solar panels or something.

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#86

Post by errcorrectcode »

Bio CCS using the ocean. Nothing else can be cheaper than letting nature do 99% of the work. That is if there's the will to do it.

Also, Putin is mostly fine with climate change because Russia (and possibly Canada) will be arguably the disproportionate net winner in a 2.5 C world.

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#87

Post by xyzzyz »

Sankozi wrote: post #74
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics. So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something…

If you had process that only needs electricity then you run it only when power is cheap (usually when renewables are producing it). Depending on efficiency this could be better solution than energy storage (instead storing energy you pull CO2 and then burn it later if energy is needed).

Carbon capture techniques do not necessarily allow you to easily burn the captured carbon again. For example, consider a process where calcium oxide is used to capture CO2, converting it to calcium carbonate (that’s how masonry mortars work). You can’t convert calcium carbonate to energy.

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#88

Post by AnthonyMouse »

BurningFrog wrote: post #66
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics. So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something…

Removing CO₂ is far more doable, because you don't have to convince/force 7 billion people to do something. Anyone with the right equipment can just do it, without asking permission, just like CO₂ emitters can.

You don't need permission to pay people to install wind turbines either. What you need is money. And if you have money, and a dollar spent installing wind turbines goes further than a dollar spent extracting CO2, why are you going to spend it on the inefficient thing?

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#89

Post by [deleted] »

aunty_helen wrote: post #18
jandrese wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, having an actual price tag on removing carbon from the atmosphere would allow carbon markets to finally work. Assuming there is enough political will to properly monitor and tax CO2 emissions worldwide, which is a huge ask. A lot of companies and countries will be tempted to lie because it will make their products more competitive.

Cant we see this from space? Estimate the amount of co2 coming from each country that way and send them a bill every year. My first thought was “that’s where auditing and bureaucracy come in” but maybe satellites are a better way

[deleted]

Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

#90

Post by cassepipe »

Sapere_Aude wrote: post #79

[flagged]

Your only argument is that CO2 is good for the plants. It's a bit light and does not really account for the cycle of carbon on the planet. It's like saying, since sun is good for the health, fuck the ozone layer of the atmosphere haha. So now I am quite weary of visiting "Ice age farmer"'s personal website. Please get out of your information bubble, it's not too late.

Btw I rather prefer my own conspiracy theory that the most wealthy on the planet are already old, do not care about what happens after they die and don't want to change anything that might affect profits on which rest their privileges. I don't any secret documents to prove it though. Just a feeling.

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