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

Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

cicero.oslo.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 221 posts

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#121

Post by hurricanetc »

hannob wrote: post #34
hurricanetc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That process is entirely electric and so the benefits depend completely on the energy provider, is 10 years away from actually-maybe happening, and requires CCS to be carbon neutral. The last bit is the most relevant to this particular discussion.

> requires CCS to be carbon neutral Why would that be? Hydrogen doesn't contain any carbon. If you produce the hydrogen from electrolysis and the electricity from renewables the process would be carbon free. (You can still argue that there are emissions in construction and such, but I don't think that's what you meant.)

There are other metals and materials involved. It’s a partial solution. We really aren’t even close to a truly carbon neutral steel production. Maybe by 2100.

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#122

Post by acidburnNSA »

hannob wrote: post #112
hedora wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is already viable in countries with sane regulatory environments (France, and hopefully China, given how fast they’re ramping up). The fact that the US market structure and regulators led to unsafe and unprofitable power plants has little to do with the underlying technology.

> Nuclear is already viable in countries with sane regulatory environments (France, and hopefully China, given how fast they’re ramping up). France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... "A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2019 the project is three times over budget and years behind schedule." China:…

> reality

Between 1975 and 1988 the world added 250 GW of carbon-free nuclear generation. That's 20 GWe/year.

https://www.iaea.org/resources/databases/power-reactor-infor...

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#123

Post by MChristopherson »

supernova87a wrote: post #115

CCS technology is uneconomic. Like incredibly uneconomic. Like, the last thing you would pay for after doing all other possible things. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/gillingham_sto... https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate...

That is an important point that struck home with me when I came to realize just how minuscule the amount of carbon dioxide is in the air relative to other gases: it's nigh-on a rounding error.

I think many of us just haven't internalized the percentages of gasses, and probably, like myself, often have it all backwards. An alien doing a fly-through of our solar system would describe our planet as a nitrogen atmosphere.

In descending order:

  Nitrogen: 78 percent
  Oxygen: 21 percent
  Argon: .9 percent
  CO2: a measly 0.04 percent
Groking that last value really helps frame the challenges that CCS has to deal with (and also gives one an appreciation of just how powerful of a greenhouse gas CO2 is).

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#124

Post by detritus »

tito wrote: post #93
mmmuhd wrote: post #91

I think carbon capture is the way, I will soon do a show hn of our little company called carbonHarvester, we have as per as I know the cheapest technology of capturing the CO2 out of thin air, our aim is to enable anyone using an air conditioner to harvest CO2 from thin air with a little additional energy bill, and we can regenerate the captured CO2 cheaply.

Nice! Add your company to AirMiners, the largest index of companies mining carbon fro the air: http://airminers.org We'll feature it on the top of the list.

Neat! Not sure how useful it would be to others, but the first thing I tried to do was sort the list by country.

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#125

Post by tobias3 »

CPLX wrote: post #10
tobias3 wrote: post #8

My intuition is that it would be almost always cheaper to pay e.g. Norway and Saudi Arabia to not pump out the captured carbon (in form of fossilized plant matter) in the first place, instead of pumping it out in the form of oil, burning it, then capturing the CO2, liquifying it and finally pumping it back underground where hopefully it doesn't bubble up again. But that would be the problem a world-wide carbon emissi…

I mean it actually isn’t that simple. In a market with significant inelasticity in demand you’d certainly see the price rise if they pressed the stop button, but the decline in consumption in the short term wouldn’t be as severe. As long as there’s other places to get the product the market would adjust to meet that demand. Granted in the long term higher prices would help a lot, but a tax at the point of demand/cons…

Yeah, everything every individual or even individual country does doesn't matter in the grand scheme. That's kind of the problem (tragedy of the commons). One way to break the tragedy of commons is to lead by example, take the societal high ground, pressure others to join and finally shun everybody that doesn't participate. E.g. Norway could press the stop button, they'd be poorer (but other countries aren't lucky and don't have any oil) it wouldn't reduce CO2 output much over the short term, but maybe that would put other countries on the path to do it as well.

In general the more upstream the taxation the easier to implement (it would be easy to simply tax the oil an oil rig produces), while the tax income would be probably fairer distributed if the tax is at the more consumption level/downstream.

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#126

Post by scottLobster »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #76
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. The oil and gas industry is well placed to provide CCS services from an engineering perspective. Even without your second point it would be a commercial opportunity for them.

The oil and gas industry might well go bankrupt in the next decade as investors start to anticipate the huge cost of running declining businesses (with declining yields), and account for the trillions of stranded assets. Also, government will ask these companies to pay for the health and environmental cost of all their emissions. The insurance industry will also refuse to support them at some point. Why expect such a…

Have you not been paying attention to the shape boom? The US is now a net exporter of oil and we have more natural gas than we know what to do with, and it'll likely stay that way for at least the next 70 years. I'm not sure where you're getting "declining yields" from.

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#127

Post by acidburnNSA »

strainer wrote: post #101
ci5er wrote: post #99

I want to applaud you for making the most vanilla contribution in 114 years. It turns out that everyone who appears to care doesn't give a shit, and CCD doesn't matter, and neither does natural gas. I personally think it is a huge global warming scam - but if I am wrong - go to nukes. They waiting and safe (recently)

Even without CCS fossil can be switched to carbon neutral biomass and syn-gas for that occasional demand which is not economic to meet with oversupplied renewables, hydro and battery storage. Nuclear promotion desperately ignores that there will be plenty of energy generated most of the time by far more economic solar, wind, hydro and storage. There will be no point to staff and run nuclear's thermal plants most of t…

This assumes that intermittent renewable sources plus storage can be built out at astronomical scale without running into unexpected economic, regulatory, or environmental challenges. In many similar expansions of new tech, big challenges show up once the fleet size shows up. This was the central tenant of Komanoff's Power Plant Cost Escalation book (free pdf of it here: http://komanoff.net/nuclear_power/Power_Plant_Cost_Escalatio...)

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#128

Post by throwaway5752 »

MChristopherson wrote: post #123
supernova87a wrote: post #115

CCS technology is uneconomic. Like incredibly uneconomic. Like, the last thing you would pay for after doing all other possible things. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/gillingham_sto... https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate...

That is an important point that struck home with me when I came to realize just how minuscule the amount of carbon dioxide is in the air relative to other gases: it's nigh-on a rounding error. I think many of us just haven't internalized the percentages of gasses, and probably, like myself, often have it all backwards. An alien doing a fly-through of our solar system would describe our planet as a nitrogen atmosphere…

Nitpicking, but it's 0.04%, sadly.

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#129

Post by daxfohl »

philwelch wrote: post #100
daxfohl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Somewhere around 2023 Fox News is going to do a complete about-face on global warming, aggressively urging taxpayers to fund these initiatives, conveniently forgetting everything they ever said on the topic, and watchers will somehow make sense of it.

And if that happens, are you going to take the win, or are you going to cut off your nose to spite your face?

Oh, I'm sure liberals will gloat and be happy the grumpy conservatives are at the table, and everyone will agree on the importance of the problem. Then both sides will fight over who funds the solution. Liberals say big oil creates the problem and must fund the solution, conservatives will say the public demands the oil and is affected by the problem and must fund the solution. Nobody will agree to anything and the world will burn anyway.

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#130

Post by MChristopherson »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #128
MChristopherson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an important point that struck home with me when I came to realize just how minuscule the amount of carbon dioxide is in the air relative to other gases: it's nigh-on a rounding error. I think many of us just haven't internalized the percentages of gasses, and probably, like myself, often have it all backwards. An alien doing a fly-through of our solar system would describe our planet as a nitrogen atmosphere…

Nitpicking, but it's 0.04%, sadly.

Thanks for the correction! Fixed.
Post reply on HN