Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The quest to trap carbon in stone

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 73 posts

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#31

Post by brightstep »

eikenberry wrote: post #7
kornhole wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hackers like to believe there is a technological solution for everything. These projects feed that delusion. Massive reductions and degrowth are hard for us to accept. This article somewhat fairly explains how extremely impractical and unlikely carbon capture technologies will be. The investments in the technology and the PR around them serve more to feed the delusion and keep us burning as usual.

I think you can forgive people for wanting to look for solutions that don't require millions/billions of deaths, as that's the only way you'll see the level of change necessary. It will happen naturally over time as economic levels rise and reproduction rates drop below sustaining. But that will take centuries and lots of resources, so I'm doubtful that is what you are proposing.

The solution you describe has already been found: stop burning and leave fossil fuels in the ground. Technological solutions are the opposite. They're an attempt to avoid the what everyone already knows is the answer.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#32

Post by Nabati »

GunnarSturla wrote: post #17
betwixthewires wrote: post #15

I've got a question, maybe a stupid one to those in the know, but why not just trap carbon in biomass?

If we trap it in biomass, it will escape if anything happens to the ecosystem storing the carbon (like a forest fire). The fundamental problem is that the earth was in a balance, with regards to carbon; a bunch was trapped in biomass, and cycled through the carbon cycle [1]. Then humanity did two things; we destroyed a lot of carbon stores (with agriculture, deforestation and setting off soil erosion), and (more impo…

"The fundamental problem is that the earth was in a balance,"

Nit pick but, is there anything that says the earth isn't or won't be at a balance?

Sure, climate change will be hugely impactful, especially for humans, but I figure the earth will still be in balance, just not the one we are used to.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#33

Post by mynegation »

betwixthewires wrote: post #21
GunnarSturla wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we trap it in biomass, it will escape if anything happens to the ecosystem storing the carbon (like a forest fire). The fundamental problem is that the earth was in a balance, with regards to carbon; a bunch was trapped in biomass, and cycled through the carbon cycle [1]. Then humanity did two things; we destroyed a lot of carbon stores (with agriculture, deforestation and setting off soil erosion), and (more impo…

So follow up question, wasn't the carbon in oil itself sequestered from the carbon cycle? If so, this would be a reversal of that sequestration and not introduction, right? Maybe if you want to remove the carbon permanently, creation of synthetic polymers like plastics and things similar in composition to oil might be the trick.

Don’t know much about oil, but carbon in the coal was sequestered because plants got outside of water and evolved to have lignin about 50 million years before fungi and bacteria learned how to process dead plant mass. During that time (known as Carboniferous Period) burned and dead wood just turned into brown and black coal.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#34

Post by brightstep »

DennisP wrote: post #11
kornhole wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hackers like to believe there is a technological solution for everything. These projects feed that delusion. Massive reductions and degrowth are hard for us to accept. This article somewhat fairly explains how extremely impractical and unlikely carbon capture technologies will be. The investments in the technology and the PR around them serve more to feed the delusion and keep us burning as usual.

I don't see how it's delusional to look for a technological solution to a problem that was caused by technology in the first place. In any case, at this point even if we stopped emissions tomorrow we'd still need negative emissions to get back to a safe level.

The problem with the search for technological salvation is that it allows us to avoid talking about the fact that regardless, we do need to leave fossil fuels in the ground starting yesterday.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#35

Post by betwixthewires »

GunnarSturla wrote: post #28
betwixthewires wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So follow up question, wasn't the carbon in oil itself sequestered from the carbon cycle? If so, this would be a reversal of that sequestration and not introduction, right? Maybe if you want to remove the carbon permanently, creation of synthetic polymers like plastics and things similar in composition to oil might be the trick.

Yes, you could say burning of fossil fuels is a reversal of some sorts, but the earth has always stored some amount of carbon (with some of it released in volcanic eruptions). But the carbon we've re-introduced into the atmosphere had been sequestered for a long time (thousands or millions of years?) and for all intents and purposes wasn't a part of the cycle. I guess we could create synthetic polymers and store them…

Well no matter how it gets stored it has to go somewhere. And I would think the volume of some synthetic polymer would approximate the polymers it came from, so it wouldn't take much more space if any as the oil it came from. Maybe it could even be pumped back into the wells. If bacteria get at them, they were going to get at the oil anyway. And their process might be slow enough to not cause a disruption, so it might not be a big deal.

I wonder how fast the carbon was sequestered to produce oil in the natural process. We don't know how much oil there is in the ground, so we really can't tell how much faster we are releasing it than it was captured. I wonder if there's data on the effect on the biosphere from that process and some other way to gauge the speed and also total carbon that has been sequestered naturally to create oil and gas.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#36

Post by mynegation »

Ratalala wrote: post #9
wombatmobile wrote: post #6

> to grab a million tons of carbon, a direct air capture plant could devour on the order of 300 to 500 megawatts of energy per year—enough to power some 30,000 American homes.

Watts are not energy.

Megawatts per year are.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#37

Post by downWidOutaFite »

kornhole wrote: post #5
jeffrallen wrote: post #3

Climeworks' technology is the real deal, and needs to thrive. The only good CCS is 100% carbon negative and sequesters the carbon in chemically stable forms. This is it, and we need more. Petroleum industry CCS is a scam, but Climeworks is not that. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm Swiss and so is this technology.

We hackers like to believe there is a technological solution for everything. These projects feed that delusion. Massive reductions and degrowth are hard for us to accept. This article somewhat fairly explains how extremely impractical and unlikely carbon capture technologies will be. The investments in the technology and the PR around them serve more to feed the delusion and keep us burning as usual.

"extremely impractical and unlikely" also describes "reductions and degrowth" solutions. We need people working on all angles, political and technical.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#38

Post by kgin »

gtsop wrote: post #25

When I was a kid my teacher told me trees convert co2 to oxygen. If I had to suck co2 out of the atmosphere I would plant more trees and stop choping/burning down existing ones. It is cheap, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, but I guess this isn't tecky enough for today's world. Maybe if we add a wifi module on trees it would fix it.

Trees are essential, but we've released into the atmosphere so much carbon that was previously trapped under the earth in liquid and solid form. Trees aren't enough, we need to get that carbon back into long term storage.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#39

Post by Dig1t »

beaconstudios wrote: post #26
Dig1t wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"An economic contraction, or what Gaia theorist James Lovelock calls a “sustainable retreat,” Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist".. To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse. It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive tha…

I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the s…

Yeah I actually agree with you, I think it just depends on the definition of degrowth and how its implemented. Your example of WFH I totally agree with. Things like switching from meat to plant based diets, banning or taxing cars of certain dimensions or with particular capabilities, forcing people to take the train everywhere, or even more extreme things like trying to get people to have fewer children (however you go about it), are the things that could affect peoples' quality of life much more drastically.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#40

Post by anonporridge »

jeffrallen wrote: post #3

Climeworks' technology is the real deal, and needs to thrive. The only good CCS is 100% carbon negative and sequesters the carbon in chemically stable forms. This is it, and we need more. Petroleum industry CCS is a scam, but Climeworks is not that. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm Swiss and so is this technology.

By "petroleum industry CCS is a scam" I assume you're referring to efforts to make fuels from atmospheric carbon, which is only means we burn it again and put it right back in the atmosphere?

If so, then I disagree that this is a scam. Liquid carbon fuels are going to continue being mission critical for civilization for many decades to come. So much of our infrastructure is built with the assumption of liquid carbon fuels that it's going to take a very long time to migrate completely. And there may be some applications that can never be carbon fuel free.

So, projects like these are still very valuable, because they potentially reduce the need to extract and burn fossil fuels, which necessarily inject additional carbon the atmosphere. Slowly down the rate we add is just as important as permanent capture projects like this one that can actually reverse the trend.

Also, I am increasingly of the opinion that permanent carbon capture tech is absolutely critical to civilization sustainability. I think humans are going to burn every ounce of volatile carbon fuel stored up in the Earth's crust. The incentives to do so are just too great. Converting the excess carbon to a non volatile form is the only way we'll be able to control how much remains in our atmosphere.

Post reply on HN