What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil?

https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-carbon-removal-becomes-the-new-big-oil

by known • 6 years ago

189 314 6 years ago

economist.com

OneGuy123• 6 years ago

One funny thing could come out of this: too much of it could be removed.

Once a company is working on this they might accidentaly or through greed start to see "TOO MUCH CARBON" everywhere.

elric• 6 years ago

I've seen people make this comment before, and I usually just dismiss it because it seems so absurdly unlikely. But is there any grounds to that fear?

Nasrudith2• 6 years ago

Technically if it expands and runs in a carbon dioxide surplus for long enough and they maintained it for as long as thr process was viable. But it is currently a facepalm worthy seriously bad extrapolation. Like looking at carbon nanotube production assuming extrapolating exponential growth rates indefinitely and concluding that there will be a serious carbon shortage when production rises so high that every year mass equivalent to entire world's biomass is produced.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

what about a cycling synergy between digging oil and reclaiming it. A kind of circular two sided market.

98Windows• 6 years ago

Putting carbon into the atmosphere much easier than removing it, I don't see how this could ever happen

perfunctory5• 6 years ago

I can't see how CCS (carbon capture and storage) can ever be viable economically. It's pure expense. Why would anyone agree to pay for it. And if we mandate it wouldn't it make fossil products way too expensive and therefore uncompetitive? They are already losing to renewables in some regions.

edit: I just don't see the logic in shitting around and then paying somebody to clean up the shit. It's much easier to just stop shitting.

prawn2• 6 years ago

I'm not pretending it's a massive industry, but carbon offset partner for airlines and other companies is something that people pay for?

perfunctory5• 6 years ago

This is a good point. However, everything I read about air travel offset schemes suggests that the current price is way too low and does not reflect the true cost of offsetting. If people were pay the true price to offset their flights, the question is whether they would still choose to fly as much.

fsloth6• 6 years ago

Current carbon offset schemes for private individuals are there more to help people's conscience than help much with CO2 levels as such. Alms.

TheOtherHobbes• 6 years ago

Because the alternative is unrest, instability, and eventually mass death. It's hard to have a "competitive" economy when you've trashed your civilisation.

It takes a while, but that's the predictable final outcome of failing to remove the carbon that is causing climate change.

jacobush• 6 years ago

So, it’s pretty strong bet on unrest and instability then, I guess.

perfunctory5• 6 years ago

I am not questioning the fact that we should transition to the zero-carbon economy and remove excess carbon from the atmosphere. I am just saying that in my view CCS is not the most efficient way to achieve it.

baron_harkonnen• 6 years ago

Look at how well the US (and other countries) has handled pandemic. Pandemic is basically a toy-problem version of climate change:

- Action must be taken before you see consequences

- The best time to act is right away, though it might not seem a big deal if you do

- You need to trust experts

- Taking some initial economic damage is unavoidable...

- ... but is ultimately much cheaper than not taking that hit

- strong leadership and a unified population is needed to align interests and create mutually beneficial cooperation

etc, etc.

But the US failed spectacularly, and most importantly learned nothing from it.

If we can’t control pandemic easily we are certainly going to fail to make any progress on global warming

skummetmaelk3• 6 years ago

Military hardware is big business because governments want to ensure survival of their nation. The same will happen with carbon removal. The longer we fail to reduce emissions the bigger the boom will be.

wrren• 6 years ago

A key difference there is that paying for your own military directly benefits your interests, whereas countries can engage in a race to the bottom with carbon removal wherein they rely on others to shoulder the burden while still enjoying the benefits.

hedora16• 6 years ago

If that theory were panning out, NYC would be building carbon capture plants instead of sea walls.

waihtis2• 6 years ago

Heres an example where economic benefits and carbon capture are aligned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrogenic_carbon_capture_and...

waihtis2• 6 years ago

Also (expert beginner warning) apparently soil fertility is a huge issue by itself due to heavy-duty agriculture being very depletive on soil quality.

On paper it looks like a huge win-win.

iagovar• 6 years ago

Hmm, this looks realy interesting. As there are experts in any field here in HN, could this become a mitigation solution for the phosphates problem?

hedora16• 6 years ago

Biochar is too little, too late, last I checked. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done though.

fulafel4• 6 years ago

Just like garbage disposal, we just regulate a market into existence and make co2 emitters or fuel producers pay for it.

If it reduces emissions by reducing fossil demand, that's fine too.

TheSpiceIsLife• 6 years ago

You mean we make end-users pay for it.

But your wider point stands: behavioural change via financial incentives.

perfunctory5• 6 years ago

and make co2 emitters or fuel producers pay for it.

if only this was the case. I am afraid it will instead be subsidised by the tax payer.

bufferoverflow4• 6 years ago

So you force people to pay for it, instead of people wanting to pay for it. That's the major difference. People want gasoline or gas. People don't want to pay for CO2 removal, because they don't get anything back immediately - maybe a slightly cooler planet and better biosphere 50 years in the future.

hurxnid5• 6 years ago

Gasoline is now 40 dollars a litre.

brightball• 6 years ago

Garbage disposal has arguably made creation of waste more convenient.

GeoAtreides2• 6 years ago

You are right and I don't understand why you're downvoted.

CCS is literally unburning coal and oil. Gathering ashes (CO2) and putting them back in the ground. Instead of energy producing goods and services, it just funnels air into the ground. The energy needed for this is at least the same energy that was released in the last 200 years.

It's also needed to stave off catastrophe and civilisation collapse, but let's not kid ourselves: it doesn't produce anything, except in indirect ways. Capitalism is not equipped to deal with this scenario.

fsloth6• 6 years ago

Modern market-economy states have huge businesses just supporting this and that government mandate without actually producing anything - tax lawyers for example.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

Every plant is a "carbon remover". "Funnels air into the ground" can describe a potatoe plant. Surely there can be economy in that.

binbag• 6 years ago

Why is this comment so unpopular? I also fail to see how these ex oil companies will profit from carbon reduction. A far more likely scenario is they apply what they have learned in oil and gas to offshore wind generation and continue to have a business model around provision of energy, e.g. the transformation of Statoil into Equinor.

fsloth6• 6 years ago

The edge oil companies have is that they are experts in pumping lots of stuff IN to underground. That's what fracking is. Now, just replace the fracking liquid with the transport of CO2.

kayaeb5• 6 years ago

Is it though?

Renewables that are popular now, like solar and wind, are weather dependent, which means the grid needs to handle variable input, which it's not designed to do and would need major fixing. Also means you need to store the energy for when it's not abundant, Germany does this by pumping water into mountain lakes to produce hydro on demand, but they've run out of lakes, so you need batteries. Batteries of a grid-size magnitude need carbon-expensive materials and have their own plethora of problems.

These two problems are only feasibly conquerable in a reasonable timescale by a few countries, for others they are prohibitively expensive, far beyond the small subsidies proposed in things like the Paris Accord. Now, sure, USA, Europe could implement these, but it's not going to fix the problem if Asia, Africa don't, and additionally it's going to add significant economic and geopolitical pressure between these nation-blocs, those who are hamstringing themselves and those who aren't.

Hydro has serious geopolitical issues as fresh water supplies grow more tactically necessary, consider Egypt / Ethiopia right now with the Nile, or China's tibetan plateau snow-seed cannons to capture water before it reaches India.

Tidal has extremely short lifespans, any moving system in salt water is difficult to keep going for more than a few years.

Geothermal is good, but also one of the most expensive and a bit of a "slow burner," not going to be powering anything serious with that without sinking billions into the plant.

The only real solution I see is nuclear, but that's a naughty word for some reason.

fsloth6• 6 years ago

As near future sci-fi options go from 100ft up I don't see anything too problematic with hydrogen economy. Except for transport infrastructure.

Or, we remain with carbon based fuels, except they are synthesized from atmospheric carbon in regions with plenty of solar energy.

These approaches surely have challenges, but I would like to know what are the biggest ones?

kvetching• 6 years ago

Renewables are crony capitalism. Without consistent government subsidies, incentives, grants, etc...they are not profitable.

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

Renewables that are popular now, like solar and wind, are weather dependent, which means the grid needs to handle variable input, which it's not designed to do and would need major fixing.

Non-renewable plants have variable output even if it is not dependent on weather, and the grid in fact deals with variations in total and per-plant inputs whether or not solar or wind is attached. If there are problems with that, the need to address them is independent of the use of solar and wind.

wlll• 6 years ago

The only real solution I see is nuclear, but that's a naughty word for some reason.

I am sure that if you put your mind to it you can think of some reasons people might feel uneasy about nuclear power. It’s not like incidents involving it are that far in the past.

leereeves• 6 years ago

I can't see how CCS (carbon capture and storage) can ever be viable economically. It's pure expense.

If fossil fuels weren't available, profitable activities that currently release carbon from fossil fuels would be done in other ways.

For example, plastics could be made from plants, and a lot of carbon from the atmosphere would end up in landfills as a side effect of making disposable consumer goods.

amelius• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The parable of the broken window was introduced by French economist Frédéric Bastiat to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.

marvy2• 6 years ago

But no one is proposing to break anything in this discussion, right?

hurxnid5• 6 years ago

Current climate models indicate that if we want anything less than catastrophe we need to completely stop producing CO2 in 20(30?) years AND begin capturing it as well.

hedora16• 6 years ago

20-30 years from now, over 10% of the earth will be uninhabitable, so we need to start cutting emissions drastically last year to avoid catastrophe.

The outlook is getting exponentially worse each year. But, yeah, we need to be strongly net negative in a few decades.

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

Spending money just so we can continue to spend what is already too much money burning oil, gas, and coal is not a plan at all unless you have an entity dumb enough to sink money in what is clearly a loss leading venture from day 1.

So, yes it could happen because the US government currently ticks that box already and lots of companies are benefiting from all sorts of subsidized programs to funnel tax money into the cause of destroying our planet as fast as we can. Basically, this would be a yet another tax funded effort benefiting big oil, much of the car industry, etc. It's so plausible because the same kind of things have been happening for decades already.

The question why anyone would pay for that kind of thing is indeed one that needs answering because the US seems to consistently end up with leadership actively promoting exactly these kind of things and there's an election coming up with a clear choice one way or another.

jellicle2• 6 years ago

I believe the general idea now is that oil companies will pay for it as a fig leaf. Dig up 1000 tons of oil, pay for one ton of carbon capture, runs lots of commercials about your environment-friendliness, profit.

Dumblydorr3• 6 years ago

Once we ramp emissions way down, then we have to pull out the CO2 we've already emitted. It's not viable now, but EVs weren't viable 20 years ago. Once Europe and Stripe and California and all the early movers spend the first few billions, it will become much cheaper and more effective.

gonzo41• 6 years ago

It's actually a hard problem. Think of CO2 like ping pong balls.

If you have a cube of balls 100 * 100 * 100 you've got a million balls. Then mark 400 random balls. Then lets them all fall to the floor. Find the marked balls.

That's what sifting though 400 parts per million looks like and c02 molecules are smaller than ping pong balls.

gridlockd2• 6 years ago

I can't see how CCS (carbon capture and storage) can ever be viable economically.

Taxes.

Carbon emissions are externalities, regulating them is entirely compatible, if not mandatory, with maintaining a free market.

Why would anyone agree to pay for it.

Why do you agree to pay taxes? Oh wait, you don't. You are forced to pay them.

And if we mandate it wouldn't it make fossil products way too expensive and therefore uncompetitive?

Isn't that what you'd want?

They are already losing to renewables in some regions.

"Some regions" are just low-hanging fruit.

I just don't see the logic in shitting around and then paying somebody to clean up the shit. It's much easier to just stop shitting.

Only if you stop eating, which you would probably be forced to do if you were to give up on hydrocarbon-based products such as fertilizer. Also, you'll die.

Alternatively, if you were to just "shit somewhere else" instead, you will need a way to store and transform that shit. That's exactly what carbon sequestration is.

GhostVII• 6 years ago

If the government introduces a national emissions cap ("cap and trade"), then CCS can be used to offset emissions when it is too expensive to reduce them directly. If we had an economy for emissions, then companies could do CCS to get emissions credits for what they capture, and then sell them to companies who still have high emissions.

hedora16• 6 years ago

This needs to be done. Also, it would allow individuals to buy the credits and destroy them, which would further increase the cost of emitting CO2. The trick is to set the number of credits decades in advance.

grej• 6 years ago

I’ve wondered if we’d get less ire about taxes if govts allow people to directly choose how a portion of their taxes (5%?) gets allocated when they file. They could send it nonprofits for causes they care about. Given the choice of sending it into something they choose or the large centralized government black hole, more people would pick to allocate to something they care about. Carbon capture could be just one of these choices, and a lot of people care about it.

ta12345678908• 6 years ago

With today's technology, there's really no excuse for keeping governmental/political decision power away from people.

Most budget/spending and political decisions by the government should be subject to approval by the people. Everybody should have a government login and could vote through a website or app. I wouldn't mind voting once or twice per day or even more, as it would be more productive and fulfilling than social media.

vcanhoto• 6 years ago

This actually happens in Portugal. When filling your taxes you can select a non-profit to receive a cut (don't remember how much though). Family and most friends live there, and never have I heard about this changing in any way how they feel about taxes.

zo13• 6 years ago

Why stop at 5%? Why not 50, 100%? So let's assume people don't get the choice of "reducing" their taxes, but get to allocate on a per-budget category level how much of all their individual taxes get allocated? Someone can allocate the whole 100% of their salary to say education and 0% to military/defense spending. Another might decide to put lots into healthcare, plenty in education and none for military. Others would allocate 100% to military, etc.

Why would that be broken on a societal level, and how is it not "democratic" to allow people to allocate their "voluntarily given" taxes how they please? What are we afraid of happening? Can we not control the problem slightly and just give them high-level categories to try it out?

hedora16• 6 years ago

We already have that in the US. The government lets you deduct charitable donations.

I’d rather we could earmark our tax payments.

I wouldn’t send anything to any department involved in trampling basic human rights. I also wouldn’t pay a cent to oil or corn subsidies.

In such a system, I imagine Amtrak and the department of education would be getting 10x more than they do now.

Similarly, I suspect the US would be carbon negative in a few years.

The supreme court ruled money is speech, so I argue that not letting me earmark my payments is suppressing my speech.

thekyle2• 6 years ago

What you're describing is called participatory budgeting and is used in some places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_budgeting

voisin• 6 years ago

Making it “way too expensive and therefore uncompetitive” is exactly the thing that makes it “much easier to just stop shitting.”

noman-land• 6 years ago

Your last sentence is funny because it proves the opposite of your point. Why don't you just stop shitting then?

rch2• 6 years ago

A couple of decades ago I wrote a finite difference simulator for CCS as enhanced recovery for coalbed methane. The process was financially viable in Canada due to carbon credit incentives linked to the Kyoto protocol and the relatively high price of natural gas at the time. Of course the U.S. never participated and, for a variety of reasons, the price of natural gas plummeted.

There is a CCS capable coal seam within 50 km of every coal and natural gas power plant in N. America, so in the minority of cases where falling LCOE of renewables doesn't outcompete existing generation naturally it might make sense to incentivise CCS, provided that the produced natural gas would further enable renewables.

The net carbon impact could be even more significant in China.

csours• 6 years ago

"A couple of decades ago I wrote a finite difference simulator for CCS as enhanced recovery for coalbed methane."

I don't understand this, care to expand?

kickout• 6 years ago

People can and will pay for it IMO. Just too much friction for it right now. I explain a bit here about incentives https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-incentive...

hedora16• 6 years ago

CCS is more like paying someone to cleaning the streets in SF than having someone follow you around to clean up in case you decide to crap on the sidewalk.

Anyway, CCS is probably already economically viable because it is legal, and there’s no way large institutions will stop burning fossil fuels.

It would make more economic sense to transfer all of the oil subsidies to environmentally sustainable energy, but that’s politically impossible.

It’s no more likely than SF making it illegal to lock a bathroom, and simultaneously spending enough money for social services to reduce the homeless population.

jes5199• 6 years ago

I agree BUT there are new technologies that capture carbon into high-value molecules. For example, there’s a group competing in the Carbon X-Prize that has direct-air-capture that builds carbon nanotubes

chadcmulligan• 6 years ago

A carbon tax could make it viable - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax

wcerfgba• 6 years ago

Archive link to bypass paywall: https://archive.is/buUjn

tosser0001• 6 years ago

I wonder about future generations who will see their then-average temperatures as the new normal. There will be people complaining: “do you really want colder Winters?”

88840-8855• 6 years ago

I guess the question they will ask will be "do you want the flooding out of the cities that is occurring every second summer and costs billions?".

Fact is; even you "cool down" the earth, the equilibrium wont be restored easily, hence, we will experience weather extremes and must learn to live with them.

ImaCake• 6 years ago

Someone downvoted this, but this is a real and legitimate thing. It is happening continually with conservation; people don't notice the decline in animals and decrease in plant diversity because it happens over generations. In fact we even have a name for this; "shifting baselines". This is why measurement is so important, we wouldn't know about climate change without it.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

bufferoverflow4• 6 years ago

I noticed the insects disappearing. It happened to quickly, like in 10 years we went from cars needing to be washed after a drive to now, when I don't get any insects smashed for weeks.

Dumblydorr3• 6 years ago

The problem is their summers will be much longer and more brutally hot. By 2100, we could have 20-30% of the current populace living in actually uninhabitable locales because they'll be at 120F average in the summer. Who's going to care about mild winters when you can't go outside or breathe in summer?

missedthecue2• 6 years ago

This would require an enormous increase in temperature. Far in excess that the models are projecting.

PeterisP• 6 years ago

Thing is, the expected consequences of global warming are very much not uniform. Some regions will become much less habitable, but others will have their agricultural capacity increased. So it really matters which 20%-30% of the populace will be affected and how that relates to the global power balance.

Many of the currently wealthy regions could still say "why would you want colder winters?" because they can still breathe in summer (and would not want colder summers) and the locales becoming uninhabitable are somewhere else inhabited by someone else they don't care about.

lazyjones2• 6 years ago

Comments such as these make me wonder: do you never ask yourselves where most of the population of Earth lives right now and why? In the hottest areas or near them. Because for some reason, they seem to be better suited for us.

Finish that thought.

Kortaggio• 6 years ago

In effect, this is what happened to the collapse of Easter Island. Each subsequent generation forgets what was "normal" for the old generation. See Jared Diamond's fascinating account (PDF): http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password...

jeffreyrogers• 6 years ago

In the 50s John Von Neumann wrote an article exploring the idea of deliberately adding greenhouse gases to the earth to increase the amount of land available for agriculture (by allowing crops to be grown further north).

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

Anynindustrial process would have to compete with biological sequestration, with tropical, shallow seas (as with past petrogenisis), and forests being prime contenders.

The likelihood of industrial operations at this scale proving cost effective seems low.

specialist• 6 years ago

Algae converts sunshine into hydrocarbons. I'm hoping we figure out how to industrialize this process.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

That's proved highly difficult. And reaquired scales remain vast.

hedora16• 6 years ago

The entire capacity of existing biological reservoirs only turns the clock back a year or so.

Also, the oceans are already over capacity as a carbon sink, so we need to sequester that CO2 somehow as well. If we don’t, the oceans will die, and we’ll eventually have an even bigger terraforming problem to solve.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

Wetlands included?

Keep in mind that thse are natural capture-and-bury systems many times more effective than forests by unit area.

Shallow seasdon't function by dissolving CO2 but by growing byomaass (plankton or plants typically) which dies and sinks. This is thought to have been a major past mechanism and explains virtually all petroleum and natural gas fields.

Yes, CO2 saturation (carbonic acid and bicarbonate IIRC) of seawater is both finite and a major risk itself via acidification.

lazyjones2• 6 years ago

If it does, we’re screwed. Below 140ppm most life on Earth will die.

inspector-g• 6 years ago

Do you have a source for this?

hedora16• 6 years ago

I’d guess photosynthesis shuts down if CO2 falls far enough. At 180ppm, we’d be looking at an ice age:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...

hurxnid5• 6 years ago

Prediction: The will blacken the skies with nanoparticles to cool the Earth.

fsloth6• 6 years ago

Isn't 'Nanoparticles' in this case just a fancier word for 'soot'?

lucb1e2• 6 years ago

Wikipedia> Soot forms during incomplete combustion from precursor molecules such as acetylene. It consists of agglomerated nanoparticles with diameters between 6 and 30 nm.

So yes, soot are nanoparticles, but that doesn't mean all nanoparticles are soot.

tpnCC• 6 years ago

The relationship between soot aerosol and warming is complex. Black Soot may dim the sunlight,but may increase the warming by warming the snow.

"A new study found that emissions of soot, or black carbon, alters the way sunlight reflects off snow and may be responsible for as much as 25 percent of observed global warming over the past century."

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/Black_Soot....

Ash from the volcanoes on the other hand,can cause cooling depending on,among other factors,their composition.

https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/183/

For example, the cooling observed due to Mount Pinatubo is due to Sulphuric Acid aerosol particles.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...

wigl• 6 years ago

Could be a reference to "geoengineering" patents like Myhrvold's StratoShield, but he is a huge patent troll so I doubt that development is far along.

blisterpeanuts2• 6 years ago

Reforestation and preservation/restoration of natural environments, including the oceans, will accomplish the same results.

chinathrow• 6 years ago

How about we do all of that?

jellicle2• 6 years ago

Can you explain how we could preserve or restore natural environments in a world with ever-increasing CO2 concentrations?

Dumblydorr3• 6 years ago

The top thing we can do to prevent climate change is stop the deforestation of the amazon. Poor people there are logging to make way for farmland, which is sad, we could just ship them money or goods so they leave the biggest carbon sink in the world alone.

sandworm101• 6 years ago

Stop killing whales. Not kidding. Whale poop is the bedrock of c02 sequestration in the oceans.

blisterpeanuts2• 6 years ago

Ocean algae, or more properly phytoplankton, produce 80% of the world's oxygen.[1] We are experiencing a slight decline in phytoplankton[2], which if it accelerates could become catastrophic for life on Earth. It's not clear why, but some theories exist suggesting that climactic change is resulting in the release of acidic substances sequestered in the oceans. As acidity of the oceans rise, they become less hospitable to phytoplankton.

How are humans contributing to the decline of the oceans? Over-fishing, whaling, plastics pollution, acidic rain... these are all directly caused by humans, and they all damage the ecosystem. Plastics are breaking down into microparticles floating in the oceans that cannot be cleaned up, and we are only beginning to understand what and how much damage it may be causing. Studies suggest that plankton eat plastic particles, with deadly results.[3]

The second largest producer of oxygen is the Amazon forests and jungles of South America. This vast region is shrinking by thousands of acres a year, as loggers and farmers develop the land. Unfortunately, this is reducing carbon sequestration as well, though farming does counteract that trend to some extent.

Also, destruction of the Amazon rain forests is reducing biodiversity, with unknown but likely significant effects on the continent, and on the world.

Humans have grown so numerous that we are literally destabilizing the planet, and we need to rein in our excessive industrial processes before we reach a point of no return that will take the planet millions of years to recover from.

1. https://eos.org/research-spotlights/worlds-biggest-oxygen-pr...

2. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceani...

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...

swiley• 6 years ago

The forests really aren’t responsible for most of the CO2 removal. It’s mostly done by microorganisms that live in water.

owenshen24• 6 years ago

If you look at the EN-ROADS calculator, reforestation has a very negligible effect, even in the most optimistic scenarios.

https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p55=0....

If you believe their numbers and models, it's improving geoengineering and carbon taxes that will have the largest effects.

orwin• 6 years ago

I've read three articles talking about it on HN, but the science and models especially are shacky at best. Great models that will probably never work as intended.

Oxydes are really, really stable, and CO2 is one. Destroying an oxyde will cost at least as much energy as creating one, but in reality it's about 3 time the expense for C02.

The chemical/mechanical solution i've seen on HN[0] with olivine and tidal energy is quite interesting (that how ocean keep themselves from turning too acidic with CO2 capture), but while i'm pretty sure the chemestry bit is true, their paper is not peer-reviewed and i'm a bit skeptic about how fast the carbon will be absorbed.

It feel like it's nearly as much a silver bullet as fusion and ambiant temperature supra-conductor. So not big oil.

[0]https://projectvesta.org/

gridlockd2• 6 years ago

It will of course be cheaper to pump hydrocarbons out of the ground for a long time to come, but we have recognized that there's a problem with that.

"Energy use" is the wrong way to look at it, because energy costs vary massively. A lot of renewable energy effectively goes to waste because there is no economical way to capture and store it.

cwhiz• 6 years ago

I don’t think there is a single viable climate model that doesn’t rely on massive carbon capture. Carbon capture is one of many things we will have to do to avoid mass extinction.

lucb1e2• 6 years ago

Indeed. It won't be fast enough, but neither will we be fast enough stopping to emit. We have to do both.

I'm not sure it's possible to reach the goal of staying below 2°C warming anymore, but the degree to which we incur change and damage the existing ecosystems can still be limited. Seeing how little we've managed to reduce carbon emissions by, and given that there will always be some emissions, we indeed need capture methods; heck, even if it's just trees, we need something. We need some way to recapture the remaining emissions, whatever reduced amount we'll be left with in the end.

If you want to fund that sort of work today, Climeworks has a product where you can choose how many kg of CO2 you want to capture per year and pay for it. They have machines that indeed remove that actual amount for you, turning it into stone rather than something re-consumable. What they don't say is how much CO2e the building and operating of those machines emits and whether that'll be offset with said machines, but I'm happy to fund their technology either way. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way except having the subscription for about 1.5 years.)

https://climeworks.com

Other than tree planting organisations (which never seem to be able to convincingly promise that the trees won't be uprooted or burned for farmland before they captured the promised amount, especially given that the offerings are usually dirt cheap), I'm not aware of any other organisation offering products for consumers, so that's also why I'm arguing for people to give Climeworks money: if there's money to be made with it, more companies will start capturing carbon.

ghthor3• 6 years ago

I dont agree with you, and there is a body of scientific evidence that is building that doesn't agree with you[1]. This evidence points to the most likely cause of mass extinction being changes to the sun and the environment of the solar system. In my opinion based on my research, if we are to avoid mass extinction, we need to be acknowledging the sun as the main driver of climate change on earth now and in the near future, not the emissions of our activity on earth.

[1] https://otf.selz.com/item/pre-order-weathermans-guide-to-the...

fnord77• 6 years ago

This is not the consensus.

https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2910/what-is-the-suns-role-in-...

mdorazio• 6 years ago

You're pointing to a book "authored" by a person who runs a pseudoscience YouTube channel and has no scientific training whatsoever. Please, start looking for information in less biased and more mainstream places - your worldview will be improved as a result.

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

make diamonds out of this carbon and maybe you got something that will take care of the problem forever

macspoofing• 6 years ago

Is carbon removal even capable of making a dent? Is it even worth discussing? CO2 is a tiny component of air, meaning that we would have to move vast quantities air through some sort of a filter to get tiny amounts of carbon out (i.e. 1 million particles of air, to filter out 400 of CO2).

hedora16• 6 years ago

With current technology, it costs between $30-90 per ton to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

A gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2 (most of the weight is from O2 from the atmosphere).

A ton is 2000 pounds, so 100 gallons of gas produces a ton of CO2.

A $1/gallon (25-33%) carbon recapture tax on gasoline would be enough to make cars carbon negative.

Global warming is a political, not technical, problem.

hedora16• 6 years ago

I also wish there was an easy way to buy and shut down oil producers. There are 8.3 million millionaires in the US, so they control 8.3T.

Chevron is worth 180B. If the millionaires banded together to control 50.1% of Chevron, they could oust the board, permanently destroy all of its oil production and distribution capabilities, and convert its oil fields into a permanently undrillable status.

Then, they could sell off the remaining assets (except the mineral rights), and only lose most of their money. Heck, the resulting shuttered corporation would probably be eligible for carbon credits.

Even better, instead of buying the oil reserves, they could buy out the corporations that own patents and factories for things like fracking equipment and critical car components.

Anti-trust would probably get in the way, but the global airbag industry has revenue in the single-digit billions. A band of 100,000 millionaires could easily acquire them all and charge $80,000 extra (per car) for bags headed to gas powered vehicles.

Synaesthesia• 6 years ago

Millionaires/billionaires wouldn’t act against their own interest or class interests. There is one way to achieve what you are dreaming of: democratic control of industry.

hedora16• 6 years ago

8.3M is the top 2-3% of the population. It’s a very diverse group of people. I imagine many would chip in 10-100K if it meant crashing global CO2 emissions.

Also, on its own, the money it would save in flood or fire insurance would make it a rational investment for a big chunk of them.

meiraleal• 6 years ago

the other way is communism

gre• 6 years ago

That's the exact situation right now except they aren't shutting it down.

elamje• 6 years ago

Great first order impact. Now consider second order. Exxon and Co buy distressed assets at depressed prices and resume production with an even better margin.

hedora16• 6 years ago

Two words: Private equity.

You can’t buy what’s not for sale.

Alternatively, they could transfer the oil assets to a separate company, and take that private.

8note• 6 years ago

Or another one:

People find out there's a great business plan for creating oil companies so they can be sold to environmental groups

mtgp10002• 6 years ago

Shutting down petroleum overnight would completely shutter the economy and starve/kill millions of people.

hedora16• 6 years ago

The status quo will starve/kill billions in a few decades and make 10% of the earth’s land mass uninhabitable:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim...

The least destructive time to take action is right now.

jackfoxy2• 6 years ago

Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available.

Deforestation rivals fossil fossil fuels for greenhouse gas emissions (up to 30% of anthropic emissions) yet it rarely gets talked about. Could it be because there is no money to be made in halting deforestation?

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-greenhous... https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671

On the fossil fuel side what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient. If such a breakthrough happens we could build gas turbine farms at gas fields and pipe the CO2 to industrial centers. Modern gas turbines are the most efficient form of electricity generation. The emissions consist almost entirely of H2O and CO2, some collateral NO2, and trace amounts of other stuff from combusted impurities.

api• 6 years ago

There's not much money to be made in fossil fuel phase out either... some, but overall it is a cost. Halting deforestation and reforesting aggressively would be a lot cheaper at the macroeconomic level.

beervirus• 6 years ago

Green energy is big business. There isn’t really a corresponding industry that would profit from halting/reversing deforestation.

MiroF2• 6 years ago

overall it is a cost

What does this mean? Seems like it is a cost from some perspectives and a positive from other perspectives.

From the perspective of green businesses, likely a positive. From the perspective of society, removing the negative externality is likely a positive.

The only cost it imposes is on those who were previously externalizing their costs on to society.

topher515• 6 years ago

My understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful, simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem.

All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb 8 years of greenhouse gas emissions.

This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests “compressed” into oil / gas.

jackfoxy2• 6 years ago

Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year

~30% of which is from ongoing deforestation, unless the quoted ~25 gigatons is from fossil fuels only?

tunesmith2• 6 years ago

There's this pattern of:

- We should do "X"

- But doing "X" won't solve "Y"

- But "X" will help

- But "X" won't solve

- But "X" is necessary

- But "X" isn't sufficient

And I think the unstated conclusions are whether we should actually do "X" or not. I think the answer is usually Yes, we should do X (in this case, plant as many damn trees as we can), but I also think that's me arguing from an individual perspective and not a group psychology perspective.

Like, when people argue "but focusing on trees could distract us from addressing the entire problem", I used to just be dismissive of that, but I'm starting to feel like those objections should be taken more seriously - particularly having gone through this COVID debate where people focused so much on "flattening the curve" - which was necessary, not sufficient - that too many people signed on to gradual reopening just as the (high-amplitude) curve started flattening. If we had socialized a different benchmark, maybe it would have been more effective in the long run.

(But still, even if only in parentheses, plant trees.)

neutronman• 6 years ago

Bill Gates has reached the same conclusion. He’s funded carbon extraction tech that takes up a football field in size but does the job of millions of trees.

https://prepforthat.com/bill-gates-funds-project-that-extrac...

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

You'll likely appreciate Jeffrey Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", which quantifies fossil fuel synthesis and utilisation:

https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.... (pdf)

bromuro• 6 years ago

There are for sure many other benefits of increasing the forested land, eg from protecting the soil to host a whole living ecosystem (from which humans can benefit from)

Not only reforestation helps with cleaning the air, but it tries to rolls back a (irreparable) damage we made to the environment during the last centuries.

godelski2• 6 years ago

That's pretty much the problem, but I should also add that this doesn't mean we shouldn't do reforestation. It just means there isn't a single solution to a complex global problem (honestly, is anyone surprised? Why the fuck are people suggesting single solution answers to complex nuanced problems?).

We should be making larger forests, fill them with birds and animals (this is actually a difficult part if you look at huge man made forests like the one in China). But we should also use man made sequestration. We should also redevelop coral reefs around the world. Etc. A lot of people seem to be forgetting the heart of the problem. There is too much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It doesn't matter how we remove them, just that we do (assuming the removal process doesn't do more harm, of course). Doesn't matter if it is natural (i.e. forests & reefs) or artificial (CCS), it needs to be removed from the atmosphere (and ocean). There's no "one size fits all" solution.

almog• 6 years ago

I am not familiar with the numbers, but do they represent carbon trapped in the forest's plants or in the forest as a whole (that includes the soil as well). The latter has an accumulative nature in regard to the soil trapped carbon being a derivative.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that calculating how much carbon a forest can store, should take the throughput into account, not just the current total capacity.

m463• 6 years ago

When I read The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, I found it really interesting to read the history of fossil fuels.

Basically whale oil and trees were replaced by coal mining - which saved whales and trees! And if I recall the coal mining saved 5x the landmass area in trees cut down (not that that helped the british isles). And then oil saved lots of coal mine deaths and strip mining.

We just gotta keep going forward. I think it's unfortunate that modern safe nuclear hasn't gotten a place. I like that solar is getting a chance at development (helped via greedy power companies.. PG&E@48c/kwh).

and yes, plant trees.

loungeleezard• 6 years ago

Humans release closer to 35 metric gigatons of carbon per year. The increased thawing of the permafrost is releasing massive amounts of CO2, methane which is 80 times more impactful than CO2, and nitrous oxide which is 300 times more impactful than CO2. The oceans are warming and they are releasing increasing amounts of CO2.

Humans haven't been able to even slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, and now with the melting glaciers, thawing permafrost and warming oceans, which are all locked into positive feedback loops, it won't be long until the earth it's self will sustain the global warming pattern with no help from humans.

Between the oceans, the glaciers and the permafrost they sequester almost 2.5 times the CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere.

All we need is a technology that will capture and sequester greenhouse gases on a global scale to the tune of about 60 gigatons per year, this way we'll capture all the human released greenhouse gases, plus the emissions from the melting glaciers, thawing permafrost and warming oceans, and capture enough more so that we can eventually reverse the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations back to the early 1700's. Oh, one last thing we need to invent this technology in about the next 10 years.

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

You're missing an important detail: forests don't capture CO2 just once (in the form of organic matter, e.g. wood); they also capture it continuously... Slowly turning CO2 into coal/oil over millions of years, which is not included in the count for CO2 in forests.

It's instead like a slow by-product of it; as if we had "fossil forests" underneath live ones, which several gigatons of additional sequestered carbon.

Doubling the size of forests on Earth would provide benefits that go beyond the simple, one-time CO2 capture you refer to.

Someone• 6 years ago

Generalizing/ignoring details/bluntly, the people using the fossil fuels are rich and do it to buy more stuff/go on holidays more often. The people doing the deforestation are poor and do it to survive (sometimes in order to make stuff for the rich)

It doesn’t help telling poor people to stop deforestation, because they have no choice. The way to get there is by having the rich consume less.

claudeganon• 6 years ago

...or the rich people could just pay the poor people so they don’t have to engage in deforestation? That money could be invested into other sectors of their economy, raising the overall standard of living?

semi-extrinsic2• 6 years ago

what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient

Unfortunately this is somewhere between hopelessly improbable and impossible, for two reasons:

First, our CO2 storage needs are in the tens of gigatonnes per year. At the highest practical storage density of pure CO2, one gigatonne is about 10^9 cubic meters - 400 times the volume of the Hoover Dam. There are simply no existing human product streams that are within even a couple orders of magnitude of being able to absorb that.

Second, CO2 is a waste product. Turning it into any other useful product will demand not just the energy gained from burning the fuel, but quite a bit more due to thermodynamic inefficiency.

There absolutely ain't no free lunch with regards to CO2 capture. It's perfectly doable but it's a pure cost that should just be government regulated everywhere ASAP.

zoomablemind4• 6 years ago

...CO2 is a waste product.

If we could turn it to become a resource, perhaps it will be consumed out, just like the rest of resources we humans discover.

One possibility maybe applying photosynthesis, if we knew how to do it in a practical manner. We know that plants can do it, we know generally how they do it, but still can't replicate it.

With photosynthesis, the CO2 ends up in some form of sugar among other things. Where the hydrogen comes from water, and we want that hydrogen for energy.

Of course, as with anything done by humans, there's a danger of abuse. In such case, we could 'overharvest' the CO2 such that it could starve the plants, leading to oxygen shortage... And that's another doomsday scenario.

All in all, the problems point at the humans, so far Earth tolerates us.

unchocked2• 6 years ago

The problem is that it doesn't address the root cause. Broadly speaking, there's two places carbon can be: in the biosphere or locked up geologically. Our fossil fuel emissions - by definition - came from geological deposits. We need to put them back into geological formations, otherwise when the trees we've planted die their carbon will just go back into the atmosphere.

hansvm• 6 years ago

Putting aside any quips about how our oil fields used to be part of the biosphere, I do think the current view is that forests are net carbon sinks, even accounting for decomposition.

Regardless, the time scale for growing and decomposing a forest is enormous and would buy a lot of flexibility in solving the problem more permanently if additional research shows them to not be efficient sinks long-term.

fiblye• 6 years ago

I hear this a lot, but does every bit of that really just go up into the air? Don’t trees often break down and become soil, and new trees grow on top of them?

mNovak• 6 years ago

Clearly dead trees have some carbon storage capacity, otherwise there would be no fossil fuels in the first place.

quotemstr2• 6 years ago

Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available.

No it isn't. Reforestation might be the most aesthetically and ideologically pleasing option, but it's not the most physically effective one. Trees get you $25-$50/ton-CO2 removal costs; accelerated weathering gets you around $8/ton-CO2 [2]. Iron enrichment of the ocean can get you down to around $1/ton-CO2 removed.

Focusing on pretty solutions in harmony with nature will lead us down the wrong path. Every great thing mankind has done has been the result of science, technology, and industry. We don't fly around the world by stupidly copying birds, and we won't get control of the climate by sowing plants.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0485-x [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/22/1004218/how-gree... [3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/300/5616/67.full?maxt...

drewm1980• 6 years ago

Cheeky human! Human technology is not great, it is childish and destructive. I say this as a fellow technologist dedicated to improving it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_swift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigatebird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_longaeva

That 5k year old tree wants us to get out of the way and let the adults clean up the mess before everything dies.

vbezhenar• 6 years ago

Do you have any numbers? How many square kilometers of forests should we grow to compensate for all CO₂ emissions?

Here's some hypothetical numbers. Correct me, if they are way off.

1 tree = 0.5 m³ of wood = 250 kg of CO₂.

1 ha = 10 000 m² = 500 trees = 125000 kg of CO₂.

Humanity CO₂ emissions at 2018 year are 33 100 000 000 000 kg. So you would need 264.8 millions of hectares (2.6 millions of km²) of forests to compensate for those emissions.

There are 38 millions of km² of forests on Earth right now. So even if we would double our forests (and that would be a truly tremendous task), that would buy us 14 more years of emissions (and that would not get back all the produced CO₂, by far).

It's not even clear if we would be able to keep CO₂ emissions not increasing in the future.

And there are only so much of land to plant forests.

I have more trust in some kind of phytoplankton. Oceans are vast. Those organisms can capture CO₂. Some of them will be eaten and some of them will die and submerge to depths where they'll keep that carbon forever. If they won't work well enough, future bio-engineering might fix that.

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

Go here: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions

Top are:

1. Reduced Food Waste Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 87.45 94.56

2. Health and Education Health and Education 85.42 85.42

3. Plant-Rich Diets Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 65.01 91.72

4. Refrigerant Management Industry / Buildings 57.75 57.75

5. Tropical Forest Restoration Land Sinks 54.45 85.14

The book / website consistently points out that the best reduction / capture mechanisms are related to food and industry first. Though being top 5 is no joke.

unixhero• 6 years ago

Mongstad! Mongstad! Mongstad!

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

I wonder if carbon capture actually makes sense, not from an economic perspective but from an energy perspective.

One way or another you're spending a lot of energy doing it. Using fossil fuel would not make sense as it would add to the problem you're trying to solve. Considering there's not enough renewable energy for all our current uses, wouldn't it be simpler to just reduce, and convert more things to renewable as they come available, which we'll need to do anyway?

Once we have a big surplus of renewable in the future we could look at this again.

It sounds to me like a pipe dream, a promise of a 'quick fix' for a problem that has no quick fixes.

And to be honest in order to actually reverse global warming and prevent some of the future effects we're already locked in to, we'll have to extract so much carbon that I don't see this happening in the next hundreds of years.

chiefofgxbxl• 6 years ago

If you have excess energy you cannot use at that moment, it may as well be spent removing carbon from the atmosphere. For example, if there's a giant field of wind turbines that are experiencing more wind energy than can be consumed, and there also aren't enough batteries to store it for later.

Having a more connected electrical grid so that you don't end up in this situation would probably be ideal, like what you're suggesting with using green energy to replace carbon sources.

mmarvick• 6 years ago

I am by no means an expert here, but a couple thoughts back from my limited knowledge:

1) I don't think all carbon capture necessarily requires a lot of energy input. Planting trees is a more obvious example of this - of course, the trees rely on the sun's energy so it's not "low energy" in that sense, but we weren't going to harvest that energy any other way anyways. It's possible there are other solutions that are like that.

2) If we have an abundance of zero or low-carbon energy in the future that doesn't exist now, it might not matter that taking carbon out of the atmosphere uses more energy than the energy we got from putting carbon into the atmosphere to begin with.

To be clear, I really wish we'd just spend the money and take the sacrifice to use a lot less carbon right now. It certainly seems like a much easier problem to solve than trying to suck it back out later, and relying on it to work seems like a dumb risk. Even if we're confident that we'll inevitably need some amount of carbon capture and that the R&D will happen to develop it at scale, there's a good chance that it'd be easier and cheaper to put less carbon in the air now than to do more capture later.

bobthepanda• 6 years ago

I don't even think you need "a lot of sacrifice" to stop emitting so much carbon. The EPA estimates that energy efficiency could cut emissions by up to 20%.

The trick is that most energy inefficient buildings and appliances are used by poor people who can't afford to upgrade or maintain to the latest and greatest standards, and massive funding for poor people is a giant lightning rod at least in the US. I know that in a previous house my utility was literally paying me to replace my fridge and air conditioner to reduce peak power demand, but I have no idea how widespread such programs are.

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

Trees are not a great solution. Their CO2 storage is basically static in terms of the amount, once the forest is grown it won't have a huge net capture anymore. We'd have to raze them and keep re-planting to do that. Which has obvious nature impact.

But I agree with your comment. Preventing is better at this point, especially while we're still emitting (and will be for a long time). I view Carbon Capture at this stage basically as a decoy from big oil to keep doing what they're doing.

unchocked2• 6 years ago

You're right that it's not at all a quick fix, and that it requires a lot of energy. But it is the only sustainable solution: if we want to restore a preindustrial climate we're going to have to put the fossil fuel emissions back where they came from.

So we're going to need a lot of surplus energy to do it, and it will take a long time. Which means that we need to start the R&D now, scale it up when we have surplus sustainable energy, and plan for the time it will take to execute.

Concurrently, we need to push through the sustainable energy transition as fast as possible, and probably also figure out how to reduce solar heating of Earth while we do carbon removal over the next century or so.

Welcome to the Anthropocene :)

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

I wonder if there is any point to go to a preindustrial climate though. By the time we get technology to the massive scale required to actually fix it, the worst effects will have already occurred. The climate will have already changed and we will have dealt with it one way or another.

Going back at that point will basically mean another climate change. One that will be mainly for the better but will again have impact on nature that will have adjusted in the mean time. It won't be a 100% positive. I wonder if that is really worthwhile. And if things will really get back to what they were; For one the arctic ice, would that build up again in the exact same places? They have a large effect on jetstreams so I'm not sure if things would really go back to the same way things were in pre-industrial times.

Also, in pre-industrial (and early industrial) times winters were really harsh sometimes. It wasn't all rosy either. I think around the 70s/80s the climate was the mildest though I didn't study it.

pfdietz5• 6 years ago

If carbon capture required unburning the carbon, you'd be right. But simply separating CO2 from air, or from flue gas, does not, in principle, require much energy at all.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/Q9b6b

anonymousiam• 6 years ago

As soon as we figure out how to make money or create value by removing carbon, then it will have a chance of actually becoming a business.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

Sure. Similar to how so much of Tesla's revenue is in offset emissions. But unless you carbon tax everyone you're not going to b get it. And let's be honest: most middle and lower class Americans and Europeans are burning the planet alive.

Btw, it doesn't even cost that much. I'm under $1k a year in carbon offsets to be negative.

agf• 6 years ago

Unfortunately both parts of your comment are incorrect.

Upper class Americans and Europeans generate more emissions per capita than lower / middle class people. They consume more, so they emit more.

I don't know your specific situation, but in general the carbon offsets you buy aren't actually priced to the real cost of reduction, and your estimate of your carbon footprint is likely low. So the real price would likely be significantly higher. If you're living in a large (and so heat / cooling efficient) building in the bay area where those costs are minimized anyway, and don't have a car, then you're an outlier, and you can't extrapolate accurately from your situation.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

Sure, they generate more, but the lower/middle class Westerners can't afford what they generate but the rich guys can.

The price of the offset doesn't matter because for climate change locality effects are not big on this scale. I double the estimate from Terrapass so I'm pretty certain it's good.

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

Likely the greatest threat to our species is that the new big oil, is big oil.

jtlienwis• 6 years ago

Back of the envelope calculation says that one gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs of CO2 when burned. One hundred gallons of gas per ton of CO2. I have seen sequestration costs of $200-$500 a ton for current CO2 sequestration or conversion to fuel hydrocarbons. This would work out to a $2 to $5 dollar tax for gallon of gas. So this would take us to $4 to $7 per gallon gas to create a sustainable CO2/hydrocarbon economy. For a lot of people, this would be better than spending an extra $20K+ for an EV. Twenty thousand dollars buy a LOT of gas. Ten to 15 years worth for a typical computer driving 10k a year even with the added taxes. Plus, this might make some places like New York, more politically open to oil/gas pipelines and fracking etc to increase supplies because gas/oil would now be green.

kapuasuite• 6 years ago

Turning 8(?) pounds of gasoline into 20 pounds of CO2 makes absolutely zero sense.

slavik81• 6 years ago

2 C8H18 + 25 O2 = 16 CO2 + 18 H2O

Don't forget the weight of the oxygen that goes into the reaction.

dan-robertson• 6 years ago

One thing that I think is overlooked in this thread (though I didn’t read it all) is that carbon capture/sequestration is not incompatible with burning fossil fuels. You get the energy by breaking bonds of (somewhat) complex hydrocarbons, but it takes less energy than is released to capture/sequester the resulting carbon (at least theoretically/for some methods). Therefore there is a possible future where energy could come from fossil fuels without CO2 release.

There are other reasons one may not want energy from fossil fuels, however.