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Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

climeworks.com

161–168 of 168 posts

Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I see carbon capture being a top pick in discussions about effective altruism and by the clean air task force. I believe their reasoning is that for the amount of money invested, it remains one of the most efficient investment to decarbonize. I don't know what to do with that information.

Presumably because getting the world to stop burning fossil fuels is an enormous effort, which we're not doing an especially good job of, so far. Carbon capture isn't practical yet either (opinions differ on if it ever can be, and there certainly are some big problems to overcome), but that might still make it easier to pull off than ceasing our CO2-producing ways.

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Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We created this problem by using energy and energy is the way back out of the problem. Energy released by burning one barrel of oil: ~6 GJ. Total number of barrels consumed per year: ~100M Total energy per year: 6 * 10^17 J Solar flux on 10^17 J/s or 3 * 10^24 if we had a machine that could convert CO2 -> Carbon in some stable form, we would need to use 10^-7 of the earth's solar flux. At a very high level such a mac…

> I never understand the hysteria over this topic. It seems to be a gross mix of a few things: -Most people are simply incapable of doing this type of analysis. They hear that "the sky is falling, and the only way out is to perpetually give up our comforts and live shittier lives", and they believe it. -People get really hung up on forcing their personal "correct" way of doing things on everyone else. Whatever their…

The typical American buys unnecessarily large cars, lives nowhere near mixed zoning and uses AC in inefficient housing. It amounts to huge amounts of wasted energy. That's not someone to emulate.

There are correct ways that are correct because they're effective and incorrect ways that aren't. Those ways should be imposed on people in tragedy of the commons type market failures. It follows from the social contract.

Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#163
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow is debatable, it’s something like 3 orders of magnitude faster than all the current artificial carbon sequestration systems in operation right now combined .

A sizeable fraction of the atmospheric carbon only gets sequestered by geological processes that take thousands of years. Comparing it to the basically nonexistent artificial sequestration is not very helpful.

Seems like a reasonable benchmark to say if we spend X00 billion per year we can double the rate of long term sequestration or whatever. It places things in a fairly clear cost vs benefit calculation.

Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s basically only there to postpone legislature and offload the cost to tax payers while keeping private profits high. Not just taxpayers, every living thing has to endure the increasing effect of failed climate preservation. As we have seen there's not really enough taxpayers to make a difference, what's more effective would be voters but there's even far less of them since voting is prohibited most places and pr…

I’m very confused here, did you accidentally respond to the wrong comment? But that’s unlikely too, as you even quoted me… I disagree with none of your points. The only reason I can imagine for your comment is that you've misunderstood there term green washing perhaps? This is it's official definition: > Greenwashing, also called "green sheen", is a form of advertising or marketing spin in which green PR and green ma…

I do exactly think this is just greenwashing by JPMorgan.

I see the $200 Million as token support for a misguided effort that is being given a spin as something more effective than it really is.

The climate cost to society has always been offloaded primarily because it was not accounted for financially.

What better PR than to put (a little bit of) their money where their mouth is by supporting Climeworks, no deceptive advertising campaign necessary, just that level of spin at this point.

Climeworks seems to be saying foremost exactly what JPMorgan wants them to say, more convincingly than JPMorgan could say for itself.

>the energy spent capturing the CO2 is quite significant, so it's not even certain that their CO2 contribution is subtractive at the end.

You seemed to have grasped this more so than others.

Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#165
post #59

Climate scientist David Ho has a good thread on CDR: https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of #carbon #dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ #removal (CDR) like a #time #machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example: Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million #trees take us? A: If one mature tree tak…

So 10 billion trees would take us back about 2.3 days. Still not a lot, but it’s something. 10 billion trees is what one can conservatively plant on 30 million acres, which is the area currently used in the US to produce bioethanol.

Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their plant is in Iceland and runs on geothermal

Geothermal is not good for global warming bc it is an additional source of energy which would normally be contained. The sun gives such amount of wattage and the earth can give so much wattage back to the universe. Nuclear, geothermal and fusion is stored energy like fossil fuel which adds to the heat in the atmosphere. Today that only amounts to 5% of global warming but if it's the only source of energy it could add…

This doesn't make too much sense in this case, the geothermal energy is being stored in chemical bonds in the carbon sequestration process and returned underground

Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it? I've wondered the same about these carbon capture plants. Is this literally just elemental carbon in some kind of dust/sand at the end of the day? Could this be a raw material input for carbon fiber production?

Elemental carbon is a valuable industrial material -- and even low-quality carbon, like "carbon black" soot, ain't cheap! Nah, separating carbon from oxygen in CO2 and CO is too expensive and energetically demanding. To simplify things a little bit, what they do here is inject CO2 into water at high pressure, which results in highly acidic H2CO3. They then pump H2CO3 into basalt rock, which chemically reacts with the…

Great explanation that I've never seen on any of these carbon capture sites. Thanks.

Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Somehow, I get a sense that the governing bodies are going to cause far more harm to people than the climate change. That sense is called "your priors." This is a very simple, mostly linear switch on top of very very very complex systems, ie CO2 concentration. Your argument is basically "we broke it, but if we fix it it will be more broken" and there's just no evidence for that, just speculation. As long as other ba…

> That sense is called "your priors." I have my priors & you have yours. "Your priors" seems to be that funneling money to large institutions fixes our problems. My prior is that funneling money to large institutions creates corruption & misaligned incentives. History has shown that large institutions which have utopian ideals make dreadful mistakes often based on a silver bullet mentality. If only we kill all of the…

The balance has long been defined as 1990 levels of CO2, so those aren't my priors, they are those of the expert community of which I am not one, and neither are you despite your wall of text which is really nothing more than trying either to convince yourself or signal your cult-members.
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