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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

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Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#421

Post by opo »

astrodust wrote: post #188
nostromo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's just curtail CO2 emissions We are though. Most people I talk to don't know that the US peaked CO2 emissions ten years ago and it's been falling every since - in per capita, per GDP, and absolute terms.

The United States fully intends to reverse course on that and fire up coal plants in order to something something jobs. The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.

The main reason it is falling is because of natural gas substituting for coal in the power sector and that will continue to happen due to the low prices for natural gas.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#422

Post by bloaf »

deialtrous wrote: post #332
ForHackernews wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even nearly enough. According to the recent UN report, we need cut global net emissions by 50% in the next 12 years, and get to zero net CO2 by 2050. This is a slow-motion catastrophe and people aren't nearly worried enough to take the steps necessary to avert it. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genoc... https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

But that UN report is based on predictions we know with 100% certainty to be incorrect. That's politics, not science. Science says "learn to do math before telling everyone the world is ending".

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Basically every organization that has looked at the issue and built a serious model has reached the same conclusion. From early studies done by engineers at oil and gas companies, to research undertaken by skeptics, the message is the same: we're not in Kansas anymore, and we're running out of time to turn around.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#423

Post by loeg »

philwelch wrote: post #339
loeg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It reduces emissions but does not sequester carbon (unless you bury it and don't burn it).

You could just "bury it and don't burn it". The US already has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Assuming that you can recycle something close enough to the original petroleum, you could even process the recycled fuel into durable petroleum products instead of consumable ones (lubricants, plastics, etc.) Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and…

Yes, ignoring economic incentives, they could just bury it. (Due to similar incentives, Chevron and BP aren't leaving oil sequestered in the ground.)

Shipping petroleum from Earth's surface to Mars is almost certainly prohibitively expensive.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#424

Post by neolefty »

all_usernames wrote: post #71

I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it "recycled fuel." Apparently it can be used in existing combustion engines. And it is already up and running. Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-co…

Reading the article:

It's not carbon-neutral — just better than gasoline:

> Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said.

So where exactly is the energy coming from? I don't see any mention of renewable sources in that article. Is it somehow combining methane and CO2 to get larger hydrocarbons?

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#425

Post by ageofwant »

louprado wrote: post #420

"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem - including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work". I had a recent crackpot idea that falls into the "unlikely to work" category since my background is not chemistry. Given that a modern automobile's tailpipe emissions are mostly C02 + H20, those molecules can be converted into ethylene (C2H2) using known effi…

That is interesting. Perhaps more applicable to large industrial CO2 emitters like fossil fuel power plants.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#426

Post by btilly »

User23 wrote: post #309
btilly wrote: post #59

I would strongly suggest investigating the claims of http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli... that after mining, milling, and then being spread in the ocean, olivine rocks weather quickly and take out CO2. The estimated costs of large scale CO2 sequestration this way are surprisingly reasonable, and the technology is already available. Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into t…

> wipe out all shellfish species worldwide Look you raise good points but this is nonsense. The Earth has had far higher CO2 concentrations for geological periods and there’s no fossil record suggesting shellfish all died. This kind of Trumpian rhetoric just hands ammo to the skeptics.

It only seems like nonsense because you're missing an important piece of the science.

Acidification is not caused by how much CO2 there is in the water. It is caused by a rapid increase in CO2 levels. We are dumping CO2 in very quickly, and so are acidifying the water.

But given time, oceans will mix down the to bottom. At the bottom it will encounter very large stores of calcium carbonate. As that dissolves, it renders the water no longer acidic. As that mixes back to the top the rest of the ocean becomes less acidic. This mixing process is estimated to take on the order of 1000 years. Therefore the long term the oceans can handle all of the CO2 we're dumping into them and much more. Increasing the long-term average CO2 of the atmosphere will not make the oceans acidic.

The problem is that this mixing process is too slow to help shellfish living near the surface today. Sure, the ocean winds up at a good ph. But it will be acidic for several centuries. And that is unprecedented. In fact there is no record of any event since the Permian-Triassic extinction over 200 million years ago that featured such rapid acidification as the oceans face today. And perhaps not even that one. We estimate that several times as much CO2 was dumped into the atmosphere as what we're releasing now, but it probably was not dumped in such a short time period. And that event wiped out an estimated 90% of all marine species.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#427

Post by btilly »

intended wrote: post #362
User23 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wipe out all shellfish species worldwide Look you raise good points but this is nonsense. The Earth has had far higher CO2 concentrations for geological periods and there’s no fossil record suggesting shellfish all died. This kind of Trumpian rhetoric just hands ammo to the skeptics.

Right, the ones that exist today should be evolved for today’s environment. Higher acid levels should mean most of the average stock will die, and the mutants which survive will eventually adapt. Think of the George Carlin skit - the planet will be fine, just we humans and everything we know will be gone.

See my sibling answer next to yours for an explanation of why the oceans were not then acidic despite the higher atmospheric CO2 levels. If you wait a few thousand years, ours won't be either. But shellfish who depend on their calcium bicarbonate shells not dissolving can't afford to wait a few thousand years while bathed in a mild acid...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#428

Post by btilly »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #340
chasely wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would sacrifice the largest source of freshwater on earth for the climate? EDIT: The Great Lakes are not land-locked either. They flow out to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River.

Isn't Baikal much larger?

It depends on how you measure. By surface area, no. By volume, yes.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#429

Post by yazaddaruvala »

aoner wrote: post #202
gustaf wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology

Hi Gustaf, I read earlier that you are more interested in Direct Air Capture technologies than others. Do you have any specific reasons? I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into building materials.

I'm not Gustaf, but I'll try to answer this.

The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward.

- Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years).

- Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite well in those markets.

- With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination port with a full tank and its goods delivered.

- With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for fuel.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#430

Post by philwelch »

loeg wrote: post #423
philwelch wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just "bury it and don't burn it". The US already has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Assuming that you can recycle something close enough to the original petroleum, you could even process the recycled fuel into durable petroleum products instead of consumable ones (lubricants, plastics, etc.) Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and…

Yes, ignoring economic incentives, they could just bury it. (Due to similar incentives, Chevron and BP aren't leaving oil sequestered in the ground.) Shipping petroleum from Earth's surface to Mars is almost certainly prohibitively expensive.

You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it. Carbon offsets already exist anyway. You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation.

I'm only being half-facetious about shipping the stuff to Mars; eventually, we're going to want to terraform Mars, and creating a greenhouse effect is going to be part of that.

Or you could make lubricants, plastics, vaseline...

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