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The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

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Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#91
post #87
post #12

https://archive.is/bl4XZ It's too bad these DAC systems don't take it a step further kicking the o2 back into the atmosphere while turning the carbon into something physical and industrially valuable like say spools of carbon fiber fabric or graphene/carbon nanotubes.

Those are called "trees" and were actively killing them to create farm land to feed an ever growing population.

But are trees the most efficient technology for the job?

Trees evolved to work with the inputs of their environment, we can engineer practically anything in terms of what materials/inputs are available to a synthetic tree having the sole purpose of spitting out solid carbon.

It's non-trivial to prevent other nations from destroying their forests. But nations that care might be able to make up for it with engineering, from anywhere else on the planet, at least in terms of atmospheric co2. Is the best way for such a nation to do so to just plant trees, or can we do better? It seems like a path worth at least exploring the possibilities of.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I'm talking about. Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it.

> Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it. This is a statement of reality, not economic system. A society that decided to divert resources, today, to building a Dyson sphere on Alpha Centauri would fail, irrespective of economic system, because the goal demands more resources than it can sustainably divert.

> This is a statement of reality, not economic system.

Yes, that's my point. The worry about "economically feasible" in the ancestor comment is a question of what plans are realistic with unlimited motivation. It's not about economic systems holding us back.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something In the same way we celebrate EV and PV production, even though those may still be carbon-positive at the outset. Especially when they were still in prototyping.

Any good sources on the carbon footprint of producing a single unit of, say, the low-end Tesla?

EVs:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

> Based on a series of assumptions, the data showed that a Tesla Model 3 in the United States, for example, would need to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla.

> The model was developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and includes thousands of parameters from the type metals in an electric vehicle (EV) battery to the amount of aluminium or plastic in a car.

> Argonne's Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Technologies (GREET) model is now being used with other tools to help shape policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board, the two main regulators of vehicle emissions in the United States.

> Jarod Cory Kelly, principal energy systems analyst at Argonne, said making EVs generates more carbon than combustion engine cars, mainly due to the extraction and processing of minerals in EV batteries and production of the power cells.

TLDR ~1-2 years of driving, more upfront carbon emissions in manufacturing EVs but lower lifetime emissions overall.

PV:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... ("Implications of Trends in Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for Transitioning to Renewable Electricity")

> Recent papers argue that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for renewable electricity technologies and systems may be so low that the transition from fossil fuelled to renewable electricity may displace investment in other important economic sectors. For the case of large-scale electricity supply, we draw upon insights from Net Energy Analysis and renewable energy engineering to examine critically some assumptions, data and arguments in these papers, focussing on regions in which wind and solar can provide the majority of electricity. We show that the above claim is based on outdated data on EROIs, on failing to consider the energy efficiency advantages of transitioning away from fuel combustion and on overestimates of storage requirements. EROIs of wind and solar photovoltaics, which can provide the vast majority of electricity and indeed of all energy in the future, are generally high (≥ 10) and increasing. The impact of storage on EROI depends on the quantities and types of storage adopted and their operational strategies. In the regions considered in this paper, the quantity of storage required to maintain generation reliability is relatively small.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#94
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be hard pressed to find it again, but I remember watching a video years ago talking about the issue of buying new ovens for poor Africans in villages not actually working to reduce carbon as intended because what ended up happening is that they would just use now two stoves, the old one and new one, at the same time instead of tossing the old one and only using the new one. Great in theory and a seemingly easy lo…

Really? They're stove-limited rather than fuel-limited? Even if so, it's fixable by simply giving them as many of the new stoves as they want. It's merely a marginal inefficiency in the program.

or allow them to trade an old stove for a new one rather than give them for free.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

27 trees per acre is a low number, and based on my own experience with land returned to a forest with decent canopy, the 150 trees per acre is not unreasonable. That said, even with my estimates you’re correct that this is a lot of land, but I wanted to quickly put it into perspective. We are losing forests all over the planet, and this can also help understand the impact of that. Also, the labor you mention is proba…

No doubt we need to get deforestration under control. I'm just trying to point out that "just plant trees" is not a sufficient answer to climate change by itself. It helps, certainly.

No one thing is the answer. The answer is to do many things, for example, planting trees.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#96

Did it cost more in carbon just for the construction workers to drive their pickup trucks to build this plant than what the plant will actually remove?

Solar panels required people be clothed, fed, and transported in excess carbon emissions than the first 10,000 reduced.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt we need to get deforestration under control. I'm just trying to point out that "just plant trees" is not a sufficient answer to climate change by itself. It helps, certainly.

No one thing is the answer. The answer is to do many things, for example, planting trees.

Many things, presumably including this facility?

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt we need to get deforestration under control. I'm just trying to point out that "just plant trees" is not a sufficient answer to climate change by itself. It helps, certainly.

No one thing is the answer. The answer is to do many things, for example, planting trees.

Yes, and also this facility should help as well.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#100
post #12

https://archive.is/bl4XZ It's too bad these DAC systems don't take it a step further kicking the o2 back into the atmosphere while turning the carbon into something physical and industrially valuable like say spools of carbon fiber fabric or graphene/carbon nanotubes.

This is off topic, but does anyone else always get an infinitely reloading captcha for archive[.]is links?

At this point every thread with an archive.is link has atleast one similar comment. Etiquette should probably shift to including this info in the same comment that posts the link to reduce the noise.
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