I have a hard time taking an article seriously who uses an image of water vapor coming off nuclear cooling towers as an example of carbon emissions from energy production.
Those sort of cooling towers aren't just for nuclear power. They're the most efficient way of cooling anything, unless you're next to a river. Judging from the railway and storage around it, I think that's a coal plant.
Oh cool! I didn't realize that design was widely used, although it makes sense. If it can cool water for a nuclear plant then no reason it can't cool water for anything else!
Every time one of these articles come up I wonder about the price per tonne of CO2 removed by simply growing wood and not burning it. I'm not really sure what that price is, but it seems to be around $20-$40 per tonne? Does anyone have a more accurate number?
Taking your estimated numbers it's interesting to add that cost to the price of fuel and see where it gets you. A gallon of gasoline on average produces about 20 pounds of C02, so 100 gallons gives a ton of CO2. You can then calculate the cost of adding capture to gas prices. * At $200 per ton gas prices increase $2 per gallon. * At $100 the increase is $1 per gallon. * At $40 the increase is $0.40. * At $20 the incr…
Yea that's what I mean. It seems that cheap fast growing timber can be purchased for $20 per tonne. Dry timber is about 50% carbon and CO2 is about 30% carbon, so that means we can grow CO2 out of the atmosphere at a price of around $12 a tonne. We'll need to stack the wood somewhere but I don't think that will be terribly expensive.
You don’t let it rot. You mill it, and scorch it. That will give you a couple hundred years of protection. Then you start stacking the timbers in a pyramid. As you add more and more layers to the pyramid, the bottom layers compress, eventually becoming totally uninhabitable by bugs and bacteria. Over time you end up with a giant pyramid made of coal, and possibly diamond. (haven’t done the math on how tall you have t…
Taking your estimated numbers it's interesting to add that cost to the price of fuel and see where it gets you. A gallon of gasoline on average produces about 20 pounds of C02, so 100 gallons gives a ton of CO2. You can then calculate the cost of adding capture to gas prices. * At $200 per ton gas prices increase $2 per gallon. * At $100 the increase is $1 per gallon. * At $40 the increase is $0.40. * At $20 the incr…
Yea that's what I mean. It seems that cheap fast growing timber can be purchased for $20 per tonne. Dry timber is about 50% carbon and CO2 is about 30% carbon, so that means we can grow CO2 out of the atmosphere at a price of around $12 a tonne. We'll need to stack the wood somewhere but I don't think that will be terribly expensive.
The problem we're seeing in the US West is that wood has an increasing tendency to burn up. For this to work at least where I live we need to reforest using species that grow fast and are also relatively fire-resistant.