What about compost?
Surely the best place to sequester carbon is in topsoil where we can use if to grow food.
I have not done the maths, but I do do a lot of composting myself and it makes me wonder as I watch my soil get deeper.
U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
141–150 of 347 posts
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A wind turbine is only profitable if you can physically connect it to someone who needs energy while the wind is blowing. That will get harder as more are built.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#143> 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…
While it may impact GDP, it may not impact productive output. Less stuff will be consumed for the same output. There will be impacts on how money is shuffled around; fossil fuel profits flow from fossil fuel share holders to CCS companies, fossil fuel workers will be displaced by CCS industry workers. As renewables come online at cost parity, they will displace fossil fuel usage. That will cause a dramatic decline in…
I’m a vacuum this makes sense.
When the right has folks who held power in the White House talking about wanting a religious theology to take over, you can be sure you don’t live in a vacuum.
Too many people are against your vision, either explicitly, or implicitly given their ignorance, to take it as a given.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Suppose it costs X to do Y Don't. You can't predict prices like that. Consider that electric cars roll out of the factory having emitted more CO2 than the equivalent combustion vehicle. It takes a lot of miles to break even. If you put a price on the CO2, you may well figure out that combustion engines end up more efficient, because carbon-neutral fuel is close to being economical. > But then they'd still be better…
> Don't. You can't predict prices like that. You can predict that not emitting CO2 will cost less than emitting CO2 and then recapturing it, because it's the second law of thermodynamics. > Consider that electric cars roll out of the factory having emitted more CO2 than the equivalent combustion vehicle. It takes a lot of miles to break even. It takes about the number of miles that the average person drives in a year…
> You can predict that not emitting CO2 will cost less than emitting CO2 and then recapturing it, because it's the second law of thermodynamics.
I'm not sure that's true, in two senses.
Even if the _energy_ cost is higher, the _monetary_ cost may be lower as emissions and capture don't need to be in the same place. It may be cheaper for example to just burn some petrol to cover long distances where there's less infrastructure and instead capture an equivalent amount of CO2 using energy from solar panels somewhere sunny.
I'm not certain the energy cost must be higher due to thermodynamics. If you were taking CO2 and water and recombining them to get back nat gas and oxygen then sure. But what if you're taking the CO2 and doing something else with it? If I'm thinking about this right the bond energy in CO2 is a little lower than the overall energy released. Of course things come down then to efficiencies but I don't think there's a thermodynamics point here.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A wind turbine is only profitable if you can physically connect it to someone who needs energy while the wind is blowing. That will get harder as more are built.
At which point the most economically efficient thing becomes to install batteries or hydro or nuclear. It still isn't carbon capture, is it?
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh this is very political. You just need to follow the money. Basically carbon offsetting is the notion of adding carbon to our atmosphere by continuing to e.g. burn coal or gas and by offsetting that with carbon capture. The problem with that is that it is kind of expensive. To the point where it would be cheaper to simply stop burning stuff and maybe do something cleaner instead. By instead committing to lowering c…
How does "leaving it in the ground" get us back to 280 ppm?
It's not clear to me 280ppm is actually ideal, because below 150ppm, most plant life on Earth begins to die from the lack of CO2 in the atmosphere. It takes a couple generations for plants to adapt (which they can), but I don't imagine most crops and forests will survive the transition well.
I actually think where we're at is relatively decent. We know what's happening, can reliably predict certain storms.
Definitely don't want to go any higher, but going in the opposite direction for too long is entering ice age status.
The goal shouldn't be to adhere to a specific number, but identify an acceptable range/boundary.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#147Carbon recapture is essential for humanitarian purposes. Countries like China, India, and Bangladesh, won’t forgo industrialization to go to net zero CO2 emissions. I’m from Bangladesh and there’s just zero political will to do that. Maintaining the 6-7% annual GDP growth is literally what the legitimacy of the government is built upon. So it’s imperative for the developed world to build the technology to recapture that carbon.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#148> 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…
While it may impact GDP, it may not impact productive output. Less stuff will be consumed for the same output. There will be impacts on how money is shuffled around; fossil fuel profits flow from fossil fuel share holders to CCS companies, fossil fuel workers will be displaced by CCS industry workers. As renewables come online at cost parity, they will displace fossil fuel usage. That will cause a dramatic decline in…
>While it may impact GDP, it may not impact productive output. Less stuff will be consumed for the same output.
I think you got the first sentence flipped? GDP will stay the same, but actual productive output (eg. stuff being produced) will go down.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more plausible to me when you think about centralization vs decentralization. Sure, it would clearly be cheaper to emit less if the emissions were mostly coming from a small number of controlled facilities. But when the sources are millions of tailpipes and smokestacks across the globe, it's at least plausible that a centralized, new recapture solution would be cheaper than decreasing emissions in millions of ol…
Given how fast electrification of transportation is occurring, I think those "millions of tailpipes" may go down sooner than you think.
In rich western pockets like Norway and SF Bay sure. Globally though your median car owner can in no way afford to replace their car with a new one
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#150Carbon recapture is essential for humanitarian purposes. Countries like China, India, and Bangladesh, won’t forgo industrialization to go to net zero CO2 emissions. I’m from Bangladesh and there’s just zero political will to do that. Maintaining the 6-7% annual GDP growth is literally what the legitimacy of the government is built upon. So it’s imperative for the developed world to build the technology to recapture t…
It is ironic as Bangladesh is going to be one of the countries hardest hit by rising sea levels and climate change.