Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-02-carbon-capture-renewables.html

by Brajeshwar • 1 year ago

581 502 1 year ago

Obviously

a_c• 1 year ago

Would love to have someone knowledgeable share why carbon capture is more viable than planting trees. I always thought the idea we need technology to capture carbon is silly, but never bothered enough to research more on it

jhonof3• 1 year ago

Trees need to be cut and stored to actually capture the carbon otherwise there is a risk they burn or die and release the carbon they captured back into the atmosphere

vharuck• 1 year ago

If there are more trees in 10 years than there are now, and we keep that number relatively steady, won't that mean less CO2 in the atmosphere? Individual trees may die and decompose, but they can be replaced.

loehnsberg• 1 year ago

You can plant trees (or any plant really as long as they grow fast) and then bury it so that the carbon won't get released or at least very slowly. There's an older thread discussing this idea [1].

CCS would dispose the CO2 deep underground, like where natural gas is usually stored or extracted from. Given the cost of developing natural gas storage facilities, my hunch is that CCS is more of way of not having to deal with carbon emissions today.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794424

a-priori• 1 year ago

When trees die, they’re consumed by fungi, and the carbon is sequestered in humus (soil). That’s totally fine, and in fact is an important reason to ensure that planted forests have a fungal culture so this decomposition process occurs properly.

You’re right about fire releasing carbon. But even after devastating fires, forests don’t burn completely and plenty of plant matter remains. Even ash and soot is still sequestered carbon, not to mention charred wood even if the tree doesn’t survive.

__MatrixMan__3• 1 year ago

That's only true under certain circumstances. Sometimes the biomass accumulation is permanent.

My house was built in the 60's. The basement recently started flooding. While digging a drain to fix the problem I uncovered evidence that ground level used to be 18 inches lower than it is now. 60 years of deciduous tree action created enough new soil to change how the water flows... Instead of going around my house now it goes through.

Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?

If we actually wanted to fix this, rather than using it as marketing spin, I figure we'd be working on ways to replace deserts with forests and then on ways to ensure that whatever soil accumulation trick my tree is doing is also happening in those forests. (And golly I wish we would, I've been taking biology classes in this direction and recent political events have me thinking that the I've got some significant headwinds here).

adrr• 1 year ago

Plant trees for paper and stop recycling paper.

krn1p4n1c• 1 year ago

Money. Planting trees doesn’t pay like some absurd tech idea to vacuum it up and bond/compress it.

bbor2• 1 year ago

I’m no expert, but on a theoretical level: trees—and, more importantly, algae—capture carbon on accident as part of their respiration, which even with risky genetic modification enhancements has a natural limit on volume/biomass-level efficiency.

OTOH, with the right chemical process running at scale (“synthetic carbon capture”, apparently), the sky’s the limit! We might not have the right tech at the moment, but AFAIK there are multiple plausible systems that would work much better than what we have now.

renewedrebecca• 1 year ago

This is magical thinking.

marcosdumay4• 1 year ago

Monocelular algae is on the order of 1% efficient at converting light into biomass. Land crops are a few times less efficient than them, and trees are 1 order of magnitude or 2 less efficient than crops.

SpicyLemonZest• 1 year ago

Serious advocates consider it to be a research area, not a mature primary climate strategy. Someone in the 1930s would have been equally skeptical of “smog capture”, but it turns out modern catalytic converters are so good that we don’t have to choose between enjoying clear skies and driving around mobile smog machines.

aDyslecticCrow7• 1 year ago

Someone else pointed it out in a different way. Forrest only captures carbon as it grows. A fully grown forest is carbon neutral. Specific type of march land and oceans are the only ecosystems that properly capture and store carbon continuously.

So we need to chop the trees down again and plant new ones. Which is more feasible than technological carbon capture, but still a drop in the bucket of what is needed.

pabs32• 1 year ago

This guy argues that mature forest ecosystems are better carbon sequesters than immature ones or monoculture forests, due to biodiversity, leaf litter, fungi, soil etc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crowther_(ecologist) https://crowtherlab.com/ https://iview.abc.net.au/show/forest https://www.memorabletv.com/news/the-forest-trillion-tree-hy...

Qwertious10• 1 year ago

There's a ton of carbon sequestered in soil, that is released when the ground is torn up (e.g. when clearing an area for replanting) and then only recovers over centuries (which is essentially permanent loss, in the current context)

If you cut down an entire forest to bury it (with hypothetical carbon-neutral machinery), then replant the entire forest, you can still end up emitting more carbon than you store.

ArnoVW3• 1 year ago

The way to look at it is: there are two carbon cycles. A long cycle (proto-plankton dies, gets carbonized over millions of years, is pumped up, burned, and ends up in the atmosphere), and a short cycle (tree dies, is burned / rots, and ends up in the atmosphere).

If all we do is burn trees, there is no problem. We're not adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before. The problem is that the stuff we pump up was not there before.

So capturing in trees is at best a temporary solution. In 20 / 30 years that tree dies and is burnt or rots, and so the CO2 is released again. At best it may buy us some time while we learn to do with less oil. But it's crazy talk to do a weekend in Thailand and then "offset it with trees". That's like saying "I was broke, but I found $100 on the street, now life can continue as before".

I won't even mention the fact that large parts of the "offset economy" are essentially fraud. People that own a swath of forrest declaring "I was going to cut these 10 km2 of forrest and prevent any new tree on it, but now I won't" just so that they can get carbon credits. Even if it is painfully obvious that they never intended to do that.

loeg7• 1 year ago

Planting trees is a form of carbon capture!

bbor2• 1 year ago

I came in to drop a “glad the obvious is being confirmed!”, but after skimming the actual study I’m sadly a little dubious of its reasoning. It didn’t examine the two approaches (technically three: renewables, natural carbon capture, and synthetic carbon capture) on their engineering or economic merits, but rather just compiled historical data on jurisdictions that mainly promoted one of the three and compared the outcomes. I think the noisy nature of such an analysis is obvious, not to mention the bias against synthetic approaches from analyzing outdated tech. I’m a huge believer in renewables being the only path forward, but this study isn’t very convincing IMHO!

Also would’ve loved to see “degrowth”/reduce usage as an option, since that’s the last big one people advocate for IME.

P.S. does anyone know if the current US regime’s “any university that works on federal grants is forbidden from promoting DEI” policy is intended to apply to climate change as well? Seems likely, but I don’t recall seeing anything explicit in any of the EOs I’ve read. This study isn’t very out of Stanford, which would clearly be impacted — thus it piqued my interest.

SketchySeaBeast4• 1 year ago

Carbon capture has always seemed to me to be a means for companies to get paid both to produce carbon and then to clean it up.

s1artibartfast4• 1 year ago

As they should, provided the consumer is paying and using the carbon.

Pay an airline to take you somewhere and produce carbon, pay someone to remove that carbon.

SketchySeaBeast4• 1 year ago

Should get paid? Or should clean it up? The problem is this is energy and resources that could be spent on actually solving the problem at its source instead of finding ways to maintain the status quo.

disantlor• 1 year ago

aka we pay their negative externalities? no

pornel• 1 year ago

Who's going to pay for carbon capture? Definitely not the current polluters who benefit from fossil fuel prices that don't include the cost to clean that up. This is like a fossil fuel subsidy from a debt left to someone else to pay.

gruez9• 1 year ago

Who's going to pay for carbon capture? Definitely not the current polluters who benefit from fossil fuel prices that don't include the cost to clean that up.

Carbon emitters through carbon pricing schemes. They already cover more than 20% of worldwide emissions, with China joining a few years ago.

[1] https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...

WhyNotHugo3• 1 year ago

The old "we can sell you the solution to the problem we sold you" trick.

toenail• 1 year ago

Ah, the old consumers have zero responsibility trick.

tommiegannert• 1 year ago

Or a way to take money from green investment funds: you're never finished, but you're always only two years away. Both directly from governments and from mandates on the oil companies to do green investments.

Aachen3• 1 year ago

Cite anything that says we're two years away from using carbon capture to clean up the climate

This has never been the point. Why the strawman argument?

Asraelite• 1 year ago

So what? We would still need to work on actively reducing current CO2 levels even if emissions dropped to zero tomorrow.

tonetegeatinst• 1 year ago

The new paper regarding using a nuke to accelerate co2 sequestering in the sea from MIT....is man made water sequestration using minerals to bind the co2 from the water count as carbon capture?

The paper was published from RIT.

aDyslecticCrow7• 1 year ago

It would be carbon capture... but it feels like such a needlessly destructive method. It's up there with atmosphere manipulation in "bad ideas that we should only even consider if we're desperatre"

pfdietz8• 1 year ago

It's destructive, but it exploits the extremely low cost per unit energy of nuclear explosives (particularly large ones).

aDyslecticCrow7• 1 year ago

Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry.

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

We continue to see companies and politicians claiming it's feasible and will help us become "green". We should call them out on their shit. If we had the renewable power budget to use proper carbon capture on a large scale, we would already have a fully green grid.

---

Well... There are other methods than reversing c02 back into carbon chains.

Capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas form in underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years with likely upkeep. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)

Ideas to shove c02 air bubbles in concrete are promising but barely enough to offset the c02 generated from creating the concrete itself.

One promising approach is to grow plants and turn them into charcoal. Charcoal is great for keeping fertilizer in the soil so that we can spread it over crop fields for a small increase in yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. Almost feasible. (bamboo, algae, and sunflowers seem to be the highest biomass generators, but perhaps a slower crop that can handle worse climate is preferable)

But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.

Tade02• 1 year ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty, but there's an inaccuracy here:

In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen.

We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak, but it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them in the first place.

aDyslecticCrow7• 1 year ago

In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen.

This I wasn't quite aware of. Thanks for the correction.

But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain

This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here...

We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak,

I also agree with your list. Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP. Liquid fuel for transport is, however, the most difficult and probably the last to be replaced. It's to the point that generating green liquid fuels (that don't use fossil sources of carbon) is still actively researched and used, as air travel or shipping may never become feasible on green energy sources.

rob74• 1 year ago

Are you telling me that you're against good clean American coal?! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/trump-war-on...

(BTW I agree with you, but the current political climate - and not only in the US - seems to go in the entirely wrong direction)

pjc50• 1 year ago

There's a pretty insane scheme called "underground coal gasification" which had been proposed for the Firth of Forth. It's the same process as town gas - partial oxidation of coal to hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Bus in situ. So a controlled underground coal fire.

AnthonyMouse4• 1 year ago

it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them in the first place.

It's also theoretically possible to have chemical reactions that bind carbon from the air into solid compounds that aren't themselves combustible without a net energy loss, but then you need a very large volume of reactants and produce a very large volume of industrial waste and it still turns out to be highly uneconomical compared to the cost of replacing fossil fuels for power generation.

rob_c2• 1 year ago

I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty,

Unfortunately their success over the years is showing others like the airline industry how to behave. There's some great "support" getting cloud into the extreme left (who are anti science like the extreme right) who conveniently love talking about chem trail style nonsense... Which is a shame because if we actually made an effort to reduce these clouds we'd make a big step forward to improving things for little effort... (Notice how I'm not saying fix, we're closer to fusion at scale than battery powered commercial flights I suspect)

cyberax10• 1 year ago

In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen.

That's not quite true.

To add some numbers, the average formula for long-chain hydrocarbons is roughly CH2 (one carbon atom for two hydrogen atoms). The enthalpy of formation of water is -286kJ/mole, and for carbon dioxide it's -394kJ/mole.

Conveniently enough, one mole of long-chain hydrocarbons produces one mole of water and one mole of carbon dioxide.

It's better for pure methane, as with its formula CH4 it produces 2 moles of water for each mole of CO2. So you get 572kJ of energy from hydrogens versus the same 394kJ from carbon.

semi-extrinsic4• 1 year ago

I'm sorry, but it's clear from your statements that you don't know what you're talking about.

capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas from underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber cool and leakproof for 1000 years with yearly maintenance. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)

CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof, since they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years. Yes, there is a maximum limit of how much you can pump down, and yes there is a need to achieve good seal on plugging and abandonment. But that's the same as with any other subsea oil & gas well, it's a solved problem.

Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place.

Now it really annoys me thay researchers are still putting out papers like this, comparing irrelevant strawman scenarios and pretending it's insightful. There is extremely broad consensus that we will need all the good solutions simultaneously. Stop beating a dead horse.

Furthermore, since we've been dragging our heels on climate change, even if we achieve extremely quick shift to 100% renewables by 2040, we will need CO2 removal from the atmosphere to achieve net negative emissions.

To make an analogy, it won't be enough to cut our spending to match our income, we then need to also pay back our old debts.

Earw0rm6• 1 year ago

Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place.

Leakproof to one substance doesn't necessarily mean leakproof to another. Heavy oil is hydrophobic and a less mobile, volatile molecule than CO2. Methane otoh is lighter.

That said, CO2 capture mostly works in scenarios where you have a highly concentrated stream AND can afford the weight and energy penalty of the capture apparatus. Good on big chemical/industrial plants, refineries and maybe gas power stations, and worth doing for that reason - industrial processes are some of the hardest to replace or avoid of the big emitters. Likely useless for vehicles and aircraft.

It's very hard to feed 8Bn people without a whole lot of Haber-Bosch though, and hard to do that without methane in, CO2 out. All the more reason to cut down on wasteful uses of both food and energy.

thanhhaimai• 1 year ago

Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place.

This is survivor bias. We only see the sites where it didn't leak too much, and extract from it. The sites that leaked, we don't hear about them (no oil to extract). In fact, a quick search shows that there are many leaking sites (both on land and under the oceans). The argument you present is a case of survivor bias, especially on the time scale of multiple millions years.

aDyslecticCrow7• 1 year ago

CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof since they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years.

I simplified it a bit too much. CSS has been in use since the 1980s by the oil industry to push out more oil and natural gas from their wells. However, it is relatively small scale. I've seen proposals and demonstrations of saline aquifer projects, but I know of no currently operational such facility (and can not find it from light googling)

That the chambers could store methane or oil for 100k years is promising, sure, but it doesn't end there. Co2 is a smaller atom that has an easier time moving through small cracks. CO2 mixed with water is also a mild acid that can corrode different rock types.

Even if we had enough stable underground chambers, even if capturing the carbon and compressing it was free. How much could we even offset? We need a green grid first, not instead.

gruez9• 1 year ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

All the serious proposals for carbon capture involve use cases where it's unfeasible to swap in photovoltaics or whatever. For instance, fertilizer production, cement production, and air transport.

Earw0rm6• 1 year ago

The first two examples are feasible, the last not so much.

You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2.

That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2.

The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it).

Sorry gents, those Kenyan roses for Valentines are over. Get your loved one some tulips instead.

slashdev3• 1 year ago

Air transport is one of those things that would better offset with carbon capture - maybe even by making synthetic jet fuel, then it's carbon neutral - but very expensive. But really it doesn't matter. Air transport is 2.5% of global CO2. If we solved every other problem first, we could keep pumping oil for airplanes for centuries.

Take the engineer's mindset, reach the low-hanging fruit first. Replace coal with nuclear and natural gas, then start replacing natural gas. Cars don't need to run on gasoline anymore, BEVs are a superior technology. The market is doing its work to decarbonize that all by itself. Slowly at first, and then all at once. If you're middle-aged today, you'll likely live to see the end of gasoline cars. We can speed things along by removing subsidies on fossil fuels or offsetting them with green incentives.

mapt3• 1 year ago

Aviation fuel has a trivial replacement in renewable biofuels, and three nontrivial replacements in liquid hydrogen combustion, liquid hydrogen fuel cells, and for short flights in battery power.

pfdietz8• 1 year ago

Fertilizer production is dominated (in energy terms) by nitrogen fertilizer, and that's made with hydrogen. Hydrogen would come from electrolysis, and driving that with PV is very likely to be feasible, especially with cheap Chinese electrolysers.

pfdietz8• 1 year ago

Storing the CO2 after it's been separated is the easy part. Already CO2 is regularly injected underground to enhance oil extraction, and the CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by burning the oil.

aDyslecticCrow7• 1 year ago

CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by burning the oil.

Do check your source on that. Cause I cannot find it. The number I could find is muuuch lower than the extracted oil worth of co2.

SilasX2• 1 year ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

That's just not true. While the conclusion may be correct (about it not being feasible), it's something that would depend on more that just this first-principles analysis. Remember, the goal is only that the output is "not atmospheric CO2". So that means it could be CO2 somewhere else, or some lower energy state of the carbon, or even a higher energy state that isn't as high as the fuel that was burned to produce it.

And while, again, those methods might not be feasible, it depends on much more than the (false) premise that the only way involves completely reversing whatever process was originally used to extract the energy.

aDyslecticCrow7• 1 year ago

Carbon has a few other molecules it likes to bind to, but narrowing it down to what is actually abundant limits you to basically oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. of those, two of them are what we burned, and one of them is our problem.

Someone else pointed out, though, that you can burn hydrocarbon (carbon and hydrogen chains, aka methane and oil) and turn it into coal (carbon-carbon).

WhyNotHugo3• 1 year ago

This was intuitively obvious already, but there's still great value is having proper research prove this too. Anyone building an argument on "carbon capture is more costly" so far had the burden of proving this, even if it is intuitively obvious. Now they can cite existing research and move on with their point.

zelphirkalt2• 1 year ago

I feel like probably not much has changed. People, who will listen and think a little for themselves, will already be able to come to the conclusion, that it is better not to put the CO2 out in the first place. And those who are typically pretending to only not believe it because one cannot provide a research article, are very likely to just try to discredit the research. Some people are just so lost, that you cannot change their mind with facts, whatever those facts are, and whatever you do. They do not want to. They want you to spend more time and effort on them than is proportionate.

joe_the_user• 1 year ago

Arguing with someone who starts demanding your obvious claim has the burden of proof is useless. Any proof you offer is going to contain an obvious step or assumption and they demand proof for that too.

perching_aix2• 1 year ago

We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide.

But we don't [only]. A significant amount comes from nuclear power or renewables, especially in specific countries.

afiori• 1 year ago

This is irrelevant; the total energy cycle of a green grid can be abstracted as fossil_production + green_production + carbon_capture_consumption + all_other_uses. Since fossil_production < carbon_capture_consumption it is best to simply set them both to zero

BobbyTables2• 1 year ago

I’m also amazed people don’t talk more about reducing consumption than carbon capture.

It boggles my mind that a StarBucks coffee, drank in a few minutes involves a lined paper cup, plastic lid, plastic stopper, corrugated holder ring.

Using disposable plastic utensils in dine-in restaurants also bothers me.

All the energy spent to gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant… Seems massively inefficient for such a short use.

Yeah, a dishwasher isn’t free either but surely heating some water to clean reusable things is got to be much better than disposable trash.

Heck, compared to plastic ware and coffee cups, disposable plastic grocery bags almost seem amazingly better in terms of utility vs waste. (Less material)

esarbe• 1 year ago

Because for many people reducing consumption reeks of poverty.

They've grown up in a world where everything just yells more! more! at them. It's the dominant paradigm of our times - growth above everything. Conspicuous consumption as a measure of wealth.

It's become so absurd that even the mere suggestion of improving efficiency - at the consumer level - is met with the outcry of "forcing people into poverty". We are rich, so we can afford to be wasteful. Not be wasteful means poverty.

It's insanity.

dublinben• 1 year ago

There's no profit motive behind reducing consumption to lower emissions, so it's not a message being pushed by companies. It's obviously the easiest way for most people to reduce their environmental impact though, but it's always been very unpopular to tell people to 'spend less, save more.'

themaninthedark2• 1 year ago

Most customers aren't dine in at a coffee shop.

I would also be careful with the claim that it is cheaper to wash, mugs are heavy and require the same: gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant. Periodically replacement of broken cups as well.

Silverware makes good sense as it is not usually subject to being broken, only lost or stolen.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

Hmm. Actually. I don’t think this is quite “back of the napkin math,” which usually involves some figures, if just only very rough ones with lots of rounding.

This seems more like an argument from basic principle in the style of “I’ll reject any proposal of a perpetual motion machine because, however clever, it fundamentally can’t produce power.” And I don’t think your fundamental principle here really is correct actually.

Some ideas around carbon capture are basically to do a chemical process that releases some energy, and then make sure the byproducts don’t escape, and bury them underground, right? There’s no fundamental reason that this should be impossible. I mean it’s obviously possible to take a log, burn it in a very big airtight metal box (very big, so there’s enough oxygen in there to fully burn the thing), the box will heat up, and then the byproducts will all be in the box, so you just don’t open it. This is a silly contraption but there’s obviously no fundamental law of physics being violated, so it must not be physically impossible.

I’m unhappy to write this because I agree with your conclusion. Carbon capture is mostly bullshit. But it is bullshit for complicated reasons, not simple or fundamental ones, I think.

thinkcontext2• 1 year ago

There's an idea to do this with old oil and gas wells. Only hydrogen comes out of the well, the carbon stays underground.

https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/protonh2-launches-project-ap...

mnky9800n3• 1 year ago

I’m not going to argue the economics of it but the co2 is typically assumed to mineralise when injected into rocks like basalts ands peridotites which are the primary targets for co2 sequestration. It’s not stored highly pressurised under ground. It is absorbed by the rocks. This has been demonstrated in both the lab and the environment.

Jordanpomeroy• 1 year ago

This is my understanding as well. And the logistics of doing this can be simplified by re-using oil and gas facilities. Regardless of your feelings and levels of skepticism about oil and gas, this seems like the most straight-forward and low-energy path forward to me.

Tuna-Fish2• 1 year ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

No, we don't.

CO2 in the atmosphere is not the lowest-energy state in the system. If CO2 stopped being added to the atmosphere, it would eventually all be consumed out by chemical weathering of silicate rocks into carbonates, because that's an exothermic reaction that consumes CO2.

All the actually promising carbon capture proposals are essentially ways to speed up chemical weathering. The limiting factor here is surface area; the process is naturally very slow, and only occurs at an appreciable rate on the exposed surfaces of rocks in shallow water. None of them are cost-effective *yet* (and might never be), but there is not some one-sentence gotcha answer that prevents them from eventually being successful. They are not fighting against physics.

forgetfreeman11• 1 year ago

Um, no. The limiting factors are all still economic. If you want to try to rely on mineral weathering to reduce atmospheric CO2 any reasonable amount you now have to finance the quarrying, crushing to fine power, transport, and distribution of gigatons of stone or engineer a suitable replacement which replaces quarry and processing costs with input stock acquisition and synthesis leaving transportation and distribution untouched.

hedora• 1 year ago

Basic thermodynamics say atmospheric carbon capture will be more expensive than switching to renewables.

However, we’re already committed to carbon capture because corrupt politicians decided not to switch to renewables in the 1980’s, and will continue to block them for at least another decade (if we only want to wait another ten years to take action, we’ll need to somehow magically replace Trump with democrats tomorrow).

HPsquared• 1 year ago

It's all in the details, not really as simple as the napkin math. The CO2 capture step obviously doesn't use ALL the energy released from burning the fuel. You're not converting the CO2 back into fuel, just capturing it and sequestering it somehow. It's a question of capital and operating expense (and risks) of the process overall.

tomas789• 1 year ago

This assumes that we reverse the reaction. That does not need to be the case. We can put it back into the ground. It can either stay where natgas or crude used to be or we can basically turn that into rock (don’t know details but there is a process to do that). Or it can be put in salt caverns.

Either way we still need to capture the CO and CO2 from flue gas which is costly even from point sources and way worse from DAC. Unless we do oxyburning or fosil fuels which is a hack but you need a source of cheap oxygen which we don’t have unless we dramatically scale up electrolysis.

tzs• 1 year ago

How about for the long term?

My napkin math last time I did it said that if we took the current annual production of solar panels and used it to built solar farms in the world's subtropical deserts and built carbon direct air capture (DAC) plants in those deserts powered by those solar farms (using the energy requirements per kg of capture that current DAC plants achieve), and continued doing this each year, in around 200 years we'd be removing about 10% more CO2 per year than we'd be emitting assuming that the human population peaks as expected somewhere in the 10-11 billion range and the per capita CO2 emissions do not go much higher than they are now.

Using the entire current annual production of solar panels for this is clearly impractical now, but if production of solar panels continues its current growth trends for several more years we should reach a point where diverting an amount equal to current production might be practical.

vegetablepotpie• 1 year ago

We’re going to lose economic growth because of climate change, “Staying under the 2C threshold could limit average regional income loss to 20 percent compared to 60 percent" [1]. Whether it will be significant amount, or a devastating amount is still to be determined. US GDP is $20T, and the difference between low warming and high warming is 40% loss! This means we could spend up to $8T a year to address climate change and it would still make economic sense.

The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing, we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly people with power and influence.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-gdp.htm...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-sen...

Voultapher• 1 year ago

As much as I'm in favor of moving towards renewables, we are still destroying our biosphere, and the resources needed for renewables are not renewable ...

Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/

Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth, which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics. Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the last species alive, or at least your wining will look very sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a petri dish what it thinks.

adamsch• 1 year ago

precisely, fossil fuels are ruining the economy

User232• 1 year ago

What do you mean "we?" China has not just indicated but incontrovertibly demonstrated that they do not care about carbon dioxide emission targets. They are massively ramping up their oxidative energy production. So as I see it there are two choices.

One: deindustrialize and let China control all industrial production while having massive carbon dioxide emissions or,

Two: reindustrialize and challenge China's industrial production advantage while having massive carbon dioxide emissions.

Low emissions aren't on the table. They're not a possibility. So at this point I'm deeply suspicious of anyone peddling that fantasy. They are, most likely, spreading Chinese misinformation, wittingly or unwittingly.

ETH_start21• 1 year ago

CO2 massively increases farm yields so I find your claims to be tenuous at best:

https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_fertilization_effect

User232• 1 year ago

You're only off by an order of magnitude. $370B is around 1.25% of $30T

_bin_3• 1 year ago

cool theory. McKinsey estimates a transition like that would cost $275 trillion and take until 2050. that's a lot of money. not only that, we all know the global south will, true to form, come calling with their hands out, demanding that we pay for their stuff too. which would essentially bankrupt America. we're already tens of trillions in the hole; we can't afford it.

just as importantly, since you're making a practical argument for why we should care, your own linked analysis suggests America will experience very little impact from global warming. impact levels run from a bit below +10 to a bit below -30 with zero as no impact; looks like our projected impact is around -10.

if you were assigning America some vaguely proportional cost, we could do so relative to emissions (giving us a $40T bill) or GDP ($72T). both of those numbers are significantly greater than the current national debt. they would bankrupt the nation, cripple the common man with inflation, and screw us out of any shot at reindustrializing.

as usual, unsaid is the massive downgrade in standard of living people expect us to somehow magically accept to build this bridge to nowhere.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-ins...

cperciva• 1 year ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

In addition to the chemistry other people have mentioned -- if we burn hydrocarbons and then capture carbon we're still net positive H -> H2O, capturing carbon as carbonate rocks can be less expensive than splitting CO2 to C and O2, etc -- most serious proposals for carbon capture have involved using cheap electricity, e.g. solar power in the middle of the day.

It's quite possible that using cheap midday electricity to generate methane (which can be easily stored in large quantities) which is then burned in gas "peakers" when power is expensive would be economically profitable despite not being thermodynamically profitable.

DanHulton• 1 year ago

And the number one problem that any method of carbon capture that involves moving things around, is that you have to add the carbon expenditure of that transportation into the mix. You wanna create charcoal and spread it over crop fields? You then have to transfer that charcoal. You want to embed CO2 in concrete and bury the concrete? You have to move the concrete. (You can use it for building, but there's additional infrastructure for transporting the CO2 to the concrete or vice-versa there as well.)

So many of the "barely break even" concepts don't even come close due to this transportation factor. Even if you use solar to generate electricity to power this transportation, we don't have excess solar yet - that's capacity that's being used for this new expense, not being used to offset existing expenses.

That said, I'm hopeful that research, refinement, and excess renewable grid capacity will eventually make it worthwhile to do this in addition to reducing our fossil fuel usage, but we just _gotta_ reduce our fossil fuel usage. It's not negotiable anymore, and heck, never was.

rtpg3• 1 year ago

If you're doing the book-keeping on that stuff, though, comparing to the status quo.. that charcoal that is on the crops used to be some fertilizer that also was being transported, right?

You have to be careful not to double-count progress but if you consider things relative to status quos, then you're still looking at progress right? Like improvements are still good, right?

Like if you're dead set on building a building, you're gonna need concrete no matter what. Might as well use "good" concrete I guess? Though there's likely not much magic to where building the building _reduces_ CO2 net.

Melting_Harps• 1 year ago

But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.

This is still the best option, but even after having spent over 20 years in environmentalism in various aspects we have to admit that carbon-free is simply unattainable panacea for a myriad of reasons that go far beyond the scope of this post; but it is this form of absolutism that is the biggest hindrance from my POV--outside of the stalemates and endless impasse created by tribal/identity politics, but they often benefit from the status quo.

The truth is that methane is and remains the the biggest threat in terms of 'carbon chains,' and with a focus on market based solutions to capture and re-purpose these leaks/vents to ancillary purposes (Bitcoin mining proved the concept) and a continued expansion in plant/tree cultivation of a myriad of cultivars we would be better suited than ANYTHING that has been offered to date.

The perpetual need to try to go headlong for a one-size-fits-all approach is what has allowed us to have all the technology we need to start to reverse these systemic issues to our biosphere but be left at a constant dead-end while we wait for corporate elites and their political class cohorts to delay progress.

Sidenote: Bio-char is very useful, I worked with Biodyanimc farmers with BSc in hand on this topic in EU who were traveling to Africa to promote the use of bio-char and it's benefits to help subsistence farmers to be able to support and eventually scale their farms; while at the same time the Bitcoin community via Bit-pesa was helping with micro/small loans to said farmers that allowed for (gradual) progress.

And it is this type of seemingly diametrically opposed communities need to be bridged in order for things to actual work.

ViewTrick10027• 1 year ago

2/3 of all global investment in the energy sector is going to renewables and storage.

It is happening, but only started to truly kick off on its own in the past couple of years.

Given the lifespan of grid generation assets even a 3% increase in electricity mix per year will lead to near 100% renewable penetration when it reaches saturation.

tempestn• 1 year ago

The Project Vesta approach looks promising and at least theoretically cost effective: https://www.vesta.earth/science#Introduction

sojuz151• 1 year ago

Also, with renewable energy sources, the problem is not manufacturing energy per se but getting the energy where and when you want.

For example, you could run a gas turbine in Germany in winter at night during a spike of the consumption and run carbon capture on a desert during the day

In a sense you use atmosphere as battery/transportation system.

I am not saying that this must make sense but this is far more complex than napkin math.

gosub100• 1 year ago

solar efficiency was crap too, for decades. should we have abandoned that in the 1990's for the same reason?

gcanyon• 1 year ago

Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years

It seems highly unlikely that even 100 years from now we'll be net positive on CO2 release into the atmosphere. Renewables are a thing, and we're making significant progress.

So once we're net negative, it'll be up to us to figure out how much CO2 to release, but it seems a certainty that long before 1000 years we will no longer need to store any of the captured carbon.

ETH_start21• 1 year ago

Your opening line is totally against HN's rules against inflammatory remarks that incite flame wars.

lostlogin3• 1 year ago

yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions.

For a year? And can you offset them again the following year by adding more the next year?

defrost8• 1 year ago

First you need to clear, plough, seed, and ... much harder, water, an "Australia worth of farmland".

Every year.

That's a lot of transport energy, a great deal of fertilizer, and a continent's worth of liquid gold.

Don't forget the additional area required to offset the energy expenses of that annum's worth of additional agriculture.

dataflow• 1 year ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.

I think you're forgetting location and energy sources are a big factor here. Nobody is suggesting burning carbon to capture carbon. If you could somehow e.g. use nuclear power in the middle of the continent to capture carbon emitted across the world - that would be incredibly useful, even if you had to put in twice as much power as you had obtained originally.

(I am not suggesting carbon capture is a particularly good idea, just pointing out that your napkin math ignores some key factors.)

rank05• 1 year ago

Easy! All we need to do is convert every person on the planet to your religion!

It’s what the napkin maths say. Obviously someone as pious as you would never use electronics or fly or hang out on a startup accelerator forum.

dismalaf• 1 year ago

Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry.

The issue isn't whether or not it's feasible now.

Reducing usage of fossil fuels is a prisoner's dilemma problem... No country is going to do it if it hurts them in any way.

Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done. Carbon capture is the only potential way to reverse this and that alone is worth investing in.

It might not be feasible today but that doesn't mean it won't be feasible in 50 years...

rank05• 1 year ago

Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done.

That’s an understatement. Billions would perish in the name of “the greater good”

dogcomplex• 1 year ago

An Australia's worth of kelp farms in the deep ocean might do it too. Tricky parts are supplying the nitrogen fertilizer (upwelling might be enough), automating planting/harvesting (many drones on a wire probably) and fuel costs (offshore rig-based ideally). Sinking the kelp may keep the CO2 on the ocean floor long enough to do the trick, or sink packs of rotting kelp in kelp-plastic membranes for much longer. Bonus is this is all basically bio-fuel, so you're basically growing a renewable oil patch. Drawdown til targets are hit and then you can burn or eat the rest. Also bonus: dampens waves, so seastead potential. Recommended: attach simple motors to the anchored tethers, sinking kelp 30m down during storms or nearby ships to avoid big wave damage and the deepest hulls. Or keep it at that level for just slower growth.

_bin_3• 1 year ago

wrong. many of the energy options that are claimed to be extremely cheap and that they lean on - wind and solar particularly - aren't as cheap as they're made out to be. e.g. people love to cite Lazard's LCOE projections, which undershoot actual cost, overshoot production, and undershoot wear and tear (esp. on solar).

storage numbers also often suck. frankly, hydrocarbons are probably a better option to synthesize and store than something like lithium-ion batteries. and storage becomes a much bigger concern if one considers running a grid primarily on inconsistent renewables rather than using them as auxiliary power sources. plus your magical all-green grid still needs gas peakers most likely unless you massively overbuild that storage and generation.

KennyBlanken• 1 year ago

Lithium ion batteries have an efficiency of around 99%. They are also not the only form of energy storage system or battery technology used for ESS.

The most efficient fossil fuel power plants (combined cycle plants that burn natural gas to power a generator driven by a turbine, and then use the heat from the exhaust to generate steam in a second turbine) have an efficiency of about 60%. That doesn't even begin to address the inefficiency in "synthesizing" "hydrocarbons." Electrolysis, for example, is less than 95%.

If you have such a fundamental ignorance then you are not remotely qualified to be making comments like "wind and solar are more expensive than they're made out to be!"

You must know better than all those silly grid and solar/wind farm operators! You should ring them up and tell them how stupid they are to be using solar and wind, how they have no idea what it's actually costing them!

And no, green power is not "unreliable." Hilariously, during the massive Texas blackouts during the ice storms, wind and solar were just about the only power sources still working...

That German power system you alt-righters love to shriek about for being stupid for going green? They have one fifth the outage rate the US does. As they massively increased their green power sources, their grid reliability went up. https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...

Several countries in Europe have periods where their grids are entirely powered by renewables. But suuuuure, "magical green power" is unreliable.

nlitened• 1 year ago

Could someone please explain how could carbon capture ever work? To me it looks as if it is a mathematically impossible thing: if you produce energy by releasing carbon, you would need to expend even more energy to capture the same carbon back, so it is impossible — there’s no way to produce required energy to do so. And if you had such an huge and cheap energy source for carbon capture, you wouldn’t burn carbon in the first place — you’d use that energy source instead.

What am I missing? Am I stupid, or the people who talk about carbon capture are ridiculously dishonest?

mrmanner• 1 year ago

The carbon dioxide is captured and stored, the actual carbon isn't returned to whatever form it was before burning. So theoretically it _can_ work (but, as it turns out, it still doesn't make sense).

exe34• 1 year ago

I've always thought of carbon capture as something you do later in the timeline, after burning carbon to get you to a society that can make the transition to green energy.

this might be the case for example if you need a certain amount of innovation and that requires a certain critical mass of brains thinking over the problem.

or maybe if you're an accelerationista, you want AI to solve it for you and burning carbon now to train it might make sense.

but I don't think the idea is to ever burn carbon to capture carbon.

loeg7• 1 year ago

You would produce the energy without releasing carbon.

bsdetector• 1 year ago

You're thinking about energy and not cost.

For example, when solar plus direct air capture can remove a ton of CO2 for cheaper than it costs a container ship not to emit that CO2 then it's reduced cost for the same CO2 outcome even though it's using more total energy.

Regardless of whether it actually makes sense to capture carbon, you'll see a lot of sky-is-falling fanatics and vested interests dismissing it because it caps the price of carbon credits and limits economic damage estimates. You can't price CO2 at $500/ton to necessitate change when it only costs $200/ton to capture it - without quickly going bankrupt that is.

This is why the IPCC not even attempting to evaluate mechanical capture shows they aren't serious about solving the problem. They seemingly exist to push a fear narrative, and having an upper bound on the impact of CO2 limits their ability to do so.

usefulcat• 1 year ago

As you point out, it probably doesn’t ever make sense to use carbon capture to “offset” energy-related emissions. Probably the only way it would make sense would be as a way to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere after we’re no longer burning previously sequestered carbon.

legitster• 1 year ago

This is kind of a silly analysis. Solar power is already the cheapest source of electricity ever created by man per kwh. The problem is geography, storage capacity, and load planning.

If we're talking purely about future hypotheticals, who's to know if carbon scrubbers are less cost effective than city-sized lithium storage facilities.

selfhoster• 1 year ago

Except we we replaced all current forms of power generation with wind and solar, it would be more expensive:

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/would-getting-all-our-electr...

epistasis2• 1 year ago

That's just one guy's opinion, namely:

Richard Schmalensee, Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management

An economics and b-school professor is not equipped to evaluate a multi-decade transition, and he apparently hasn't even taken into account how batteries are falling in cost like solar and wind are.

Those who do cost-optimal grid planning find that wind, solar, storage, our existing nuclear result in a grid that is cheaper than our current grid. However the problem is that we don't do grid planning based on what costs the least, we do small incremental changes from utilities that are using cost estimates that are years out of date, and we don't think about making large scale changes that result in big cost changes.

And one other thing about looking about predictions from the past with grid modeling, everybody always underestimated the rate of how fast solar and wind prices fall. They are doing the same for batteries now.

AlienRobot3• 1 year ago

I don't think that's what he is saying.

Would switching entirely to these clean energy sources raise the price of electricity? Yes—at least if you don’t count the cost of the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, says Richard Schmalensee, MIT’s Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management..

The electricity bill will be more expensive, but that's only because the damages to the environment caused by carbon are externalized costs.

Presumably, if those externalized costs did show up in the electricity bill today, then it would get cheaper if we switched to renewable.

“If you take into account the total cost of running a system that puts CO2 into the air, [then renewables] will be cheaper,” Schmalensee says

alexey-salmin3• 1 year ago

Solar power is already the cheapest source of electricity ever created by man per kwh

Right, if you produce solar panels with coal-based electricity.

jokoon• 1 year ago

We need to have a battery checklist equivalent for carbon capture:

[ ] how much carbon is captured by KW?

[ ] are there expected improvement in the technology in the future 30 years?

[ ] and what do physicists say about it?

[ ] is it more efficient than photosynthesis?

[ ] how mature is the technology compared to other methods?

[ ] who funds it?

killjoywashere• 1 year ago

Is it possible to just pump a slurry of corn and various pulp products into dead oil wells?

semi-extrinsic4• 1 year ago

Nope. You need to understand that an oil reservoir is 100% rock, but a rock that is porous on the microlevel. Stuff that gets pumped down needs to be a proper fluid, not just a slurry, or it will just clog the pores in half an hour.

alexose• 1 year ago

Pretty much, yeah. Vaulted Deep (https://vaulteddeep.com/) is doing a version of this.

GuB-42• 1 year ago

The study is considering extremes, but that's not realistic.

Completely switching to renewables will be more expensive than planting some trees for instance. If we want the most cost effective methods, it will be a mix of both, maybe more on the "burning less fossil fuels" side than on carbon capture, but neither extreme make sense.

And it may turn out that a complete switch to renewables may not be enough anyways. We may need carbon capture too, and maybe some geoengineering.

ashoeafoot• 1 year ago

That very same trees that regularly go up in climate change caused forrest fires? Preferable eucalyptus ?

Why not grow algea and dump them down the gravity well into the dead, dark ocean, into some high salinity pit.

loeg7• 1 year ago

The dollars don't actually substitute, either. We can spend on both more than we'd be willing to spend only on renewable sources.

Matumio• 1 year ago

If you wonder whether you could at least capture CO2 directly from the combustion process (instead of out of thin air), well yes that's cheaper but still too expensive.

The current CCS projects use highly concentrated CO2 sources, while the usual combustion process will generate air with only a few percent of CO2. There was an article last year about the Hammerfest LNG plant. They have a CCS project nearby, but found it cheaper to electrify the plant: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...

tyronehed• 1 year ago

Every bit of opposition to climate change mitigation comes from the oil industry. How incredibly evil and vile they are for being willing to damage the world and our environment just to make a buck.

twodave4• 1 year ago

There’s certainly some of this, and there are also a lot of people living in difficult geographies that rely on oil. Take away global reliance on oil and these people either have to move somewhere else (and many of them aren’t exactly welcome in their neighboring countries) or else they die, starving, and in the dark. I’m not really as sympathetic to this issue as I sound, but I don’t think the characterization of 100% greed and evil is totally fair, either.

twodave4• 1 year ago

I guess I don’t see how any of this is really relevant today. Can someone help explain? My thought process is telling me that by far the worst environmental offender (China) is on the front end of a population collapse that will pretty much serve to self-correct them from an environmental standpoint. That could take 30 years at most?

I’m not sure there’s any sort of program we could implement in that time frame that really moves the needle, and when it happens most of the world’s capacity to build things like solar cells and wind farms will need to be re-built, because we won’t be getting a lot of those components we need from China anymore.

And who knows? By then maybe we look up at a smaller global population that’s largely de-globalized and decide nothing needs doing.

In the short term it’s a shame because IMO the #1 (by far, not close) contributor to global pollution doesn’t even make it to the table in these sorts of discussions.

newyankee• 1 year ago

China is not the worst offender. You are disregarding per capita, historical cumulative emissions and outsourced emissions. I am willing to bet that they have the resources, will and execution speed to decarbonise fast though, largely due to surplus solar and lots of batteries but also significant investments in wind and Nuclear.

I am not sure why a lot of Americans do not talk about efficiency in their own backyard or are even unwilling to consider a smaller footprint (it is like almost in the DNA of the country)

__MatrixMan__3• 1 year ago

The US is the worst offender by far, and seems hell bent on getting worse still.

I wish we would acknowledge it, even just among ourselves would be a great start.

wang_li• 1 year ago

China is #1 in annual emissions and is increasing every year and plans to continue increasing until at least 2030, is a larger annual emitter than all of Europe combined, and is #2 in total emissions since 1750. In fact, has released more than all of Europe combined since 1750.

Per capita is irrelevant. The thermodynamic system doesn't give a shit about how many people there are, all that matters is the amount of CO2. If you want to make some kind of moral argument you can't avoid asking the question of whether it's moral to have a kid at all. Unless you are prepared to consign your children to being a hunter gatherer until they die, they will add CO2 to the atmosphere.

Consider me and my neighbor, I am single and emit 1000 tons of carbon per year, he and his wife emit 3000 tons of carbon per year. They have triplets and increase their emissions by 500 tons per year. But somehow they are better than me now because on a per capita basis their house is only 700 tons per year per person while I'm still at 1000 tons per year? Sorry, I'm not reducing my lifestyle because they like to fuck.

If you want to measure a country or population by some metric other than total emissions, you should measure something like tons per quality of life or human development or something that demonstrates that the emissions are being used efficiently to increase overall human flourishing.

Earw0rm6• 1 year ago

A narrow idea of what constitutes freedom ("an F-650 with a full gun rack", but not "guaranteed healthcare for everyone that needs it", or "freedom from having to deal with braindead morons with F-650s and rifles", or "public goods and walkable cities").

And you're spot on as regards China, and India as well. We've had a century or two to get rich off burning this stuff, they have not.

slothtrop5• 1 year ago

The rest of east Asia is currently developing at a faster pace (e.g. Vietnam), with increasing demand for goods and services. China provides, therefore their output is increasing.

twodave4• 1 year ago

Perhaps, and also we already know in 40 years many more of their infrastructure projects will lie empty and unused than already do. They’re literally burning their way to their doom, and they may take globalization with them.

leafario2• 1 year ago

Am I wrong in assuming that after achieving a reduction in emissions, the carbon in the atmosphere should be ideally absorbed again?

buckle8017• 1 year ago

They apply a "model" which is not described to justify an artificially low price for solar power delivered to retail customers.

In reality solar is more expensive than natural gas when reliably delivered. Batteries, over provisioning, fly wheels, and finally backup idle gas power plants are not surprisingly very expensive.

D_Alex• 1 year ago

Wow. Researchers could have found this by reading Hacker News from 2019.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19579185#19579943

thelastgallon4• 1 year ago

Carbon capture is our money being used to pay oil industry. It is for enhanced oil recovery. It is straight up theft with environmental marketing!

Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.

---

We pay in 8+ different ways for fossil fuels:

(1) Subsidies of trillions of dollars per year

(2) Ethanol and biodiesel subsidies

(3) Pay at the pump (or electricity)

(4) Pay for carbon capture to help oil companies extract more oil

(5) Pay for the consequences of climate change (a) increase of home insurance (b) bailouts of insurance and utility providers (c) dealing with the direct costs of climate change

(6) Health costs! Pollution is directly linked to every disease (except STIs?). Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Think of all the cancers, cardiovascular, metabolic, every biological systems.

(7) We pay a cost of other pollutants. Lead (thank you oil industry!), mercury (thank you coal industry!). Fish was a source of food, the best kind of renewable food, where you do absolutely nothing other than catch it! This source is now gone, there is so much mercury in fish, that all recommendations of fish are to limit the number of servings!

(8) Every person on the planet is paying a fossil fuel tax (the 5 above), to the super super rich. It is a transfer of wealth from everyone to about ~100 people. This money is used to buy all assets (real estate), stocks and everything else, enabling the super wealthy to extract every more wealth from every sector of the economy.

---

Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).

If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)

To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.

But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).

slothtrop5• 1 year ago

You can talk about the inefficiency of CC, but this is nonsensical. It's a woefully inefficient means to retrieve carbon in terms of cost. It only makes sense as a means, under development, to reduce prevent buildup in the atmosphere. If it does not do that very well, then as you can imagine, the yields are not great either! If it does do that well, then it's a moot point whether these companies profit; what matters is improving climate. Can't have it both ways.

thelastgallon4• 1 year ago

Adding some references

Shell Is Looking Forward. The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change...

Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...

Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022

67% to 75% of energy is wasted. See Rejected energy:https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...

Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil: https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...

27 DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation...

A ton of {coal,petroleum,natural gas} emits {2.6,2.75,3.2} tons of CO2. 8.5 billion tons of coal burnt every year. 4000 billion cubic meters of Natural gas/year (~3000 billion tons - gemini), Global oil production is 4.5 billion metric tons/year. We'll need tens of millions of DAC plants!

Electrification is efficiency: The world will need less energy after the transition: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...

Thorrez3• 1 year ago

But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted.

What are we wasting it on? Why will we suddenly stop wasting it when we switch to solar/wind?

I would think switching completely to solar/wind would massively increase the amount of wasted energy, because solar and wind energy production is quite variable, so to meet people's needs at low production times, we need to overprovision our production.

ZeroGravitas3• 1 year ago

It's wasted as heat when converting to electricity, or as heat when running an engine, or wasted in low temp heating when a heat pump could be 4x as efficient.

Most predictions are that developed nations will double the amount of electricity they produce to electrify transport and heating but this will still reduce total energy due to the reduction in waste heat.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

(9) A whole lot of geopolitical nonsense is caused by oil related entanglements. I won’t list them all because it would become a partisan bickering match, but surely whatever anybody’s political alignment, they can find a socialist, or theocratic, or authoritarian country that’s propped up by oil funding. Or a war partially motivated by oil. What’s the cost of bad international relations? How much of our defense budget should we bill to oil companies?

thelastgallon4• 1 year ago

I forgot to add one of the biggest costs. The cost of protecting oil flow. Defense budget is to protect oil assets worldwide, any disruption/blockage to oil flow will mean economy will tank, immediately. Oil companies should be shouldering this cost.

vasco2• 1 year ago

Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).

Isn't that for food security in case of war?

throwaway1737382• 1 year ago

You can’t feed an entire nation nothing but corn.

marcosdumay4• 1 year ago

We are deep in the hole whether you want to "pay for the fossil industry" or not. If we don't push ourselves outside of the hole, we will stay there, forever.

And anyway, the best way to destroy the fossil fuel industry is to make synthetic fuels so cheap that nobody will want to use the bloody variety. We can easily do that with a carbon tax, but if people keep insisting on stopping carbon capture research, we won't.

AlexandrB2• 1 year ago

To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.

How many batteries are required to make that generated electricity available at night?

ironhaven• 1 year ago

Depending on the the wind/nuclear mix in the grid possibly as low as zero.

But batteries are a very important innovation for power grids regardless of renewable energy goals. 50% of the job of an energy grid is just keeping the ac power supply stable when generation does exactly match consumption. Lithium batteries help smooth out spikes in demand over milliseconds and hours to save millions of dollars

Lithium grid scale storage is awesome no matter what happens with renewables.

NohatCoder• 1 year ago

Napkin maths would suggest something like 20% of a normal EV battery per household, so indeed a big investment, but perfectly reasonable. The harder part is that solar power production is much lower in the winter (depending on latitude), and seasonal battery storage is still a bit out of reach.

thelastgallon4• 1 year ago

Zero. There are batteries that come in car shape and with wheels. People pay for them and there will be tens of millions, eventually 250m. They are mostly stationery (23+ hours/day) and are used 20 mins - 1 hour/day. They form a gigantic distributed storage reservoir, can absorb excess power (and get paid for it! energy prices go negative!) and supply power back to the grid when needed (and get paid again!).

lithocarpus• 1 year ago

Thanks for laying this out.

I had no idea about this until last year, when there was an eminent domain vs nimby struggle I heard about concerning putting co2 pipelines through farms for this purpose. I always thought carbon capture by machines was an impractical, but learning that what it actually is in practice is a way for govt subsidies to pay ethanol and oil companies and enable them to extract more oil.

I wouldn't be surprised if a significant majority of govt money spent on environmental efforts has been captured by industries and is being used to accelerate environmental harm. I only know that this is the case in the areas I'm familiar with. It's sad.

aqueueaqueue4• 1 year ago

Why are the super wealthy happy to kill their grandkids children. I wonder about the mental gymnastics. Very few super wealthy seem to be doing much useful.

Tostino• 1 year ago

Line goes up, right?

qwerty456127• 1 year ago

Everything is expensive but we have to start everything with something, then explore further to improve.

amunozo• 1 year ago

Carbon capture is one of the most absurd ideas I've ever heard, given the array of already available options.

slothtrop5• 1 year ago

It's not a long list, and among them is pumping sulfur in the stratosphere. It stops sounding so absurd compared to what's viable, nevermind politically.

WhyNotHugo3• 1 year ago

Planting trees is also a form of carbon capture. They literally capture carbon from the environment and release oxygen. It's as if they natural evolved to counterbalance animals.

Sadly, when people talk about "carbon capture" techniques, they're never talking about planting trees.

niek_pas• 1 year ago

Trees work, but take a long long time to grow.

Rury• 1 year ago

Trees are good but are largely a temporary store. Most of the carbon they capture ends up be re-released upon decay. Of course some does get more permanently sequestered in the ground, but a relatively small amount, and is a very slow process. I'm all for planting more trees, but I'm afraid the problem can't be entirely solved by merely planting more trees. It's also a rate problem - it may not be possible to plant enough trees to completely offset the rates we're adding carbon to the atmosphere.

alexey-salmin3• 1 year ago

A tree normally is carbon-neutral. Is captures carbon when it grows then releases it when it dies and rots.

Unless you have an ecosystem that prevents rotting (e.g. an anaerobic swamp) in which case you have steady accumulation of carbon (e.g. in a form of peat, which is a fire hazard btw). When people speak of planting trees to capture carbon they rarely mean creating swamps.

slothtrop5• 1 year ago

Probably for electricity, but that doesn't represent the vast majority of fossil fuel use. Those are not yet abated.

nullc• 1 year ago

I think it's useful to think of the atmosphere as a battery, when we burn fossil fuels we discharge it gradually by taking O2 from the air and converting it to CO2 via the 'fuel'. You can extend this to an idea of there being a little parallel capacitor with the living biomass cycle on it, but it's okay to ignore for discussion.

We can't go on discharging it arbitrarily and leaving it there because that state is toxic to us.

This battery is insanely useful because it's all around us. Because most of the work is in the ambient O2 the 'fuel' we need use use this battery is incredibly dense. The miraculous density of it is because there is two parts to it, the density when you consider both is unimpressive (as anyone who has tried to operate a chainsaw inside a fire knows all too well, or run a ic motor underground), but because we can usually disregard the air side it is truly amazing.

It's so useful the all the higher life on earth also uses it, which is part of why discharging to much it is toxic to us.

Because it's so useful we're unlikely to completely stop using it unless we leave the planet. But that means we need to recharge it. The natural recharging mechanisms are only sufficient for surface biomass buffer, not the depths of the planets' oil and coal reserves which were changed over millennia using mechnisms that no longer exist (e.g. biomass trapped before microbes knew how to digest cellulose).

Unfortunately recharging it is probably going to take all the energy we got out of it and then somewhat more. It can only take less than that to the extent that we can find less enthalpic places to stash it that are as geophysically durable as the original forms. But that isn't so bad-- no one expects any battery to be 100% efficient, and one as useful as this one is worth some cost to use it.

But this also means that the proper price for long term fossil fuels is, shockingly, not the price that maximizes oil Barron incomes-- it's the price that covers the cost run run the recharging mechanism.

We don't have to make capture cheap, we just need it to be cheap enough that oil can be correctly priced.

tmnvdb• 1 year ago

The study on which the article is based seems somewhat speculative.

The assumption for the full renewable scenario are the existence of the hydrogen economy. I'm quite positive about the potential of hydrogen but there are quite a few unsolved problems at the moment and it seems the hydrogen part of the energy transition has slowed down a bit.

Certainly the total cost of such a system is not well known at this time. So the cost calculation for the renewable scenario is quite uncertain - other energy storage tech might be more expensive.

The carbon capture calculation is based on the assumption that there is no other renewables and we go 100% capture.

This is not really that interesting an scenario, what matters more is the marginal costs of each technology at different points in the future.

In general a healthy dose of scepticism is warented when it comes to long term projections or cost of technologies, though or course policy does require we take a stab at it.

liveoneggs• 1 year ago

kind of like recycling

turnsout• 1 year ago

Oh good, this will influence all the rational policymakers in the government who are introducing common-sense legislation based on science.

OH WAIT

AlienRobot3• 1 year ago

I got some solar panels. Did the math and was impressed that they would pay for themselves in around just 2 years.

It's a bit sad that to make money you need money, but I do recommend anyone who can afford it to just install them.

loeg7• 1 year ago

For most people the break-even is longer than that. Net-metering is an unjustified gift from non-paneled ratepayers to ratepayers with solar panels.

AlienRobot3• 1 year ago

Even without net metering the solar panels cover a lot of the electricity spent and I assume they would pay for themselves eventually.

If you do the math, a single 10W light bulb consumes 0.24kWh per day if you let it on all the time. A single solar panel is rated for 2kWh per day. Many appliances are also under 2kWh per use.

Any electricity you spend during the day will be saved by the solar panel automatically. If you live alone and leave during daylight hours that might not be worth it, but for a lot of family households it's free electricity.

Geezus_42• 1 year ago

Idk why anyone would find this surprising...

BurningFrog2• 1 year ago

Here is the case for carbon capture:

- Even if CO₂ production ends today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get back to normal levels is some form of carbon capture.

- Anyone can do carbon capture anywhere. You don't need to make the whole planet agree to and implement some treaty. Just put up some solar cells and pump the captured CO₂ underground. The costs need to go down a few orders of magnitude, but I see no fundamental reason why that would be impossible

jandrewrogers4• 1 year ago

The scale of carbon capture required to make a meaningful difference implies vast industrial infrastructure and natural resource extraction that currently doesn’t exist. The carbon footprint of developing that would be enormous and require many decades to construct at a minimum.

There is a good argument that the ROI and environmental destruction is not worth it.

marcosdumay4• 1 year ago

You mean to say that to make a new industry people will have to build something new?

Or are you saying that the size of "all industries" will need to increase? Because... where do you think the carbon has come from?

BurningFrog2• 1 year ago

If there is a big carbon footprint for developing technology that erases carbon footprints, that's a problem that solves itself.

ianburrell2• 1 year ago

We would do the carbon capture after nearly all of the fossil fuels have been replaced. Like putting carbon capture on power plant doesn't make sense, running carbon capture with fossil fuels doesn't make sense. Which means we have a few decades before need to do it, but it is worth researching now.

It will take thousands of years for the elevated CO2 to return to normal. Once we stop producing CO2, the temperature will keep rising for decades. We need to do carbon capture to keep it stable. The projections for 2C include carbon capture.

fasthands9• 1 year ago

I don't see how this would necessarily apply to every scenario. Transmission is expensive and storage is still not ideal.

Briefly reading the article it seems like the author is assuming there is like a 1:1 global marketplace where any energy produced in one area can replace energy demand in another. That's just not the case.

tim3335• 1 year ago

There was an interesting idea to fix climate change by carbon capture for ~$10bn in a recent Sabine video

A Big Nuclear Bomb Could Fix Climate Change, Physicist Says https://youtu.be/aGPKpx6pMko

Just put some huge nukes in the basalt at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, it breaks it up so the rock absorbs CO2, job done!

(paper on the idea https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1)

acc_297• 1 year ago

I won't watch that video just right now but I assume the paper is this one:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06623

And I'll include this colourful quote:

"This is orders of magnitude larger than the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated, so this is not to be taken lightly."

I quickly read through and may have missed it but I do not see any mention of the timescale over which this would work just that it could sequester ~30 years worth of CO2 output.

tim3335• 1 year ago

Yeah, they do seem to skip over the details a bit. Also I'm a bit skeptical of the $10bn price tag.

I think in practice going straight to a huge megabomb straight off would not be wise but maybe we could try one of our existing spare nukes as a prototype test? Then you'd get more data on how it would work.

00N83• 1 year ago

I'm not convinced about their hand-waved explanation of radiation safety here:

The long-term effects of global radiation will impact humans and will cause loss of life, but this increased global radiation is “just a drop in the bucket”. Every year, we emit more radiation from coal power plants and we have already detonated over 2000 nuclear devices. Adding one more bomb should have minimal impact on the world.

I don't think "eh, what's one more detonation?" is persuasive when you're talking about a device more than 10x the size of all previous ones put together, being set off in direct contact with the seabed. Most of the fallout from nuclear testing came from the handful of ground burst tests that weren't fully confined, so I'm skeptical that "try to make it a clean fusion design" would actually be enough here. It would be cool if that were solvable though.

Qwertious10• 1 year ago

Why not just use conventional explosives? It doesn't seem to consider the actual marginal benefit of going nuclear.

_ache_3• 1 year ago

Hey! Pinguin doesn't eat baguette!

And there is not much military, it's more about scientists here than military people (about one hundred permanent people, space/climate scientists and biologist). The island is full of basalt yes, like most of the island, and the island is BIG. But if you are gonna nuck a french island, you should ask the French.

And it's the more important French island of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (after Adélie Land if you count it as an island).

Btw, we should be able to make the bomb ourself.

tim3335• 1 year ago

The Kerguelen Plateau is 1400 miles long so maybe they can choose a bit without baguettes? (wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerguelen_Plateau)

Pxtl2• 1 year ago

See, stuff like that is why I don't watch Sabine. She seems to just be shooting for controversy to get her name in front of people. Like when she waded into trans rights debate -- I mean she's a theoretical physicist.

tim3335• 1 year ago

I guess if you are knocking out a video a day then there's going to be a lot of random stuff in there.

aqueueaqueue4• 1 year ago

Russian roulette with planet earth eh?

If the nukes are in the basalt then it is game over. We all reincarnate elsewhere in the universe.

It has to be deeper if you believe the paper.

That "paper" feels like an LLM wrote it.

sam345• 1 year ago

Not surprising. Carbon capture methods are so out there and so bogus sounding with very little evidence that they will work, really seems just custom made to soak up government money with little promise of benefit and certainly not efficient.

James_K• 1 year ago

It's actually way cheaper as long as you imagine that some magic technology gets invented in the next few years that makes it cheaper. Then you just have to hold of until that is created and if it isn't, it won't cost you anything! Even more savings!

crocowhile• 1 year ago

That's comparing apples to oranges though. Renewables are to stop emitting CO2, carbon capture to try and recover the one we've been emitting in the past decades. We need both, the latter possibly in the shape of organic capture since it's way more efficient and cheap.

schainks2• 1 year ago

Engineering/inventing ways to emit less CO2 is fixing the root cause of the problem.

Spending energy that likely came from fossil fuel burning to "capture" CO2 is like saying you've found a perpetual motion machine. The engineering is simpler for this in some ways, but it's still not really a "good" solution.

I agree organic capture is a good idea, and CHEAPEST thing we could do to have an impact dump iron into the open ocean to spawn a phytoplankton bloom, but there is no money to be made doing that.

sfvisser• 1 year ago

Isn’t the point of most carbon capture schemes to use renewables (likely solar) as the energy source. Like Terraform Industries?

Don’t know if it will work or is economically viable, but sounds pretty win-win to me.

moffkalast3• 1 year ago

Yeah going net zero by just stopping emissions isn't just not going to help our situation that much, we've already emitted enough to fuck ourselves properly, it's also not even possible.

There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current technology, period. Anyone seen an electric tractor lately? Combine harvester EVs? Electric aircraft? Zero emission concrete? Electric container ships? Cheap plastics without oil? Electric orbital launch vehicles!? Lots of fantasy tech that ranges from being cost ineffective to borderline infeasible and we can't (or won't, anyway) run our civilization without these and dozens more that have no real replacement on the horizon. Covid has made that point really sharply clear, we just can't stop ourselves. Piston engined planes still today run on leaded gas despite knowing that it's literal poison for fucks sake, it's fuckin hopeless to convince anyone about anything when there's a chance someone might lose money.

Carbon capture might help in the long run, but the bulk of it will have to be on geoengineering to even give us a century of time to remove megatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans. And maybe a fish or two will even survive.

cyberax10• 1 year ago

There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current technology, period.

That's not quite true. All the technology is here, just not yet deployed.

Anyone seen an electric tractor lately?

Biofuels exists. Even now, we have enough biomass to produce replacement fuel for agriculture, long-distance trucking, and rail transport. We just waste it on mostly useless ethanol.

Electric aircraft?

Aircraft will switch to SAF (synthetic fuel). Right now, manufacturers are working on adapting and certifying engines to use 100% SAF and the work is expected to be completed around 2030.

Zero emission concrete?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2432222-zero-carbon-cem...

Electric container ships?

https://www.yara.com/corporate-releases/the-worlds-first-cle...

The technologies are here already. They now need to mature and then be deployed.

kennywinker• 1 year ago

Carbon capture isn’t about pulling carbon out of the air - it’s about pulling carbon out of smokestacks just before it hits the air.

Aachen3• 1 year ago

My understanding is that it's not so much about undoing past decades, but being able to even reach zero additional warming in the first place. Cows won't stop farting (that sounds like they're the butt of a joke but it's not actually, even if some feed additives reduce it), so we need to compensate for the methane. Or air travel for relevant distances (where a train won't do), we don't have the battery tech to make it zero emission but we can totally capture the carbon. (It's not super economical but it's cleaning up after oneself, it's either that or accepting further warming and much greater costs later.) Or compensating whatever emissions occur as part of making those batteries and stuff we need to capture and use that zero-emission solar/wind/water energy

_ache_3• 1 year ago

You two are right. It's about been net zero additional anthropic warming, because, as you said there is some emission we can't cut.

Zero additional anthropic warming result in progressive global decarbonizing thanks to carbon sink. (If the carbon sinks still exist when we reach 0 net emission and the permafrost hasn't thawed yet)

very_good_man• 1 year ago

Tired of the green scams. Drill Drill Drill!

112358132134552• 1 year ago

We should ban private swimming pools, tennis courts, etc.. and restrict the size of villas, ban mowing the lawn, in order to maximize the space for trees and wild plants

Schiendelman• 1 year ago

ALL you have to do to increase space for wild plants is remove height/density limits in cities. That's it. Then let people make choices about how much housing they build, and let people make choices about where they live.

You would be shocked how many people will choose to live in density, no matter what they say they want, if we weren't restricting the supply of dense housing so much it's become unaffordable.

The suburbs would simply stop growing in their tracks.

alexey-salmin3• 1 year ago

And the green crowd is surprised no one votes for them.

It's like a new wave puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

112358132134552• 1 year ago

You'd be surprised how much a wild green garden makes you much happier compared to a concrete garden with a plastic swimming pool you can use 2 months a year

lukashoff• 1 year ago

A lot of energy from renewables are being wasted due to mismatch with the demand. Building storage for it is quite expensive. I wonder if it makes sense to set up carbon capture near the places which don't have the storage. For example here in the UK we're wasting between 13% and 25% of all wind electricity generated depending on the weather/time of the year.

Findecanor• 1 year ago

Carbon capture technology is for installation inside chimney stacks, when there is no alternative to burning stuff and thus producing CO₂.

Nothing else.

You'd extract the CO₂ directly from the exhaust gases. It can't clean CO₂ from the open air. It does not scale that way.

acyou3• 1 year ago

The more you look into it, the more you realize we are already doing this, kind of. Then you realize that the real low hanging fruit is sort of in other areas, sulfur dioxide, methane capture, particulate, and especially home heating. European wood pellet and home wood burning stove users, I'm looking at you.

rafaelmn• 1 year ago

I recently saw a video by Sabine on this paper https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1 that basically proposes blowing up a gigantic nuclear bomb in deep sea basalt deposit and basalt would capture the carbon.

In the paper they did some math on the bomb size needed to reverse 30 years of carbon emissions, and it's huge (orders of magnitude larger than what we tested so far), although I don't understand why it needs to be one huge bomb. I'm sure you could try it with one military head and test the impact.

Interesting approach in any case.

jostmey• 1 year ago

...Detonating a 81 Gt nuclear device... That's multiple orders of magnitude larger than anything tested during the cold war. It's more than all nuclear explosions and tests combined

the84722• 1 year ago

We could also use that for asteroid deflection. Someone was planning ahead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)

chris_va3• 1 year ago

(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group)

Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper presents a false dichotomy.

Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming.

This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from parties that sometimes partially align with the science and sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture because it plays well and potentially increases their longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop carbon capture as part of the toolkit.

derangedHorse• 1 year ago

I also think it's a useful tool, but the economics of carbon capture have to sustain the cost of developing these methods. Pointing consumerism in the right direction seems like the most effective way to drop carbon emissions from both a short and long term perspective. We need to "stop the bleed" before tackling anything else.

chris_va3• 1 year ago

Pipelining is probably required, and there is no one magic solution here.

It took solar 45 years to become low cost, and carbon capture will probably be just as difficult. If we did things one step at a time, carbon capture wouldn't be economical until ~2080, which is too late.

criddell2• 1 year ago

Pointing consumerism in the right direction

How do you do that?

sn9• 1 year ago

That's the strategy of startups like Terraform [0][1] which use green energy production to synthesize carbon fuels using direct air capture, which are on track to be cheaper than fossil fuels without subsidies within the next few years (e.g., definitely this decade). This will both displace more expensive fossil fuels from the market while letting us leverage existing carbon fuel infrastructure.

The profit motive creates a self-sustaining cycle of rapid expansion and iteration, which should drastically increase the efficiency per unit as well as the horizontal scale of DAC so that eventually we'll have exponentially more DAC installed and then you can decide what to do with all the excess carbon, sequestering it in whatever ways make sense.

[0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...

[1] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terrafo...

palata• 1 year ago

we are still on a path to high warming

Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a world that is mostly fossil-fueled. But the truth is that it's not clear at all that renewables can scale to replace the fossil fuels. Actually it seems like they can't, realistically, totally replace them.

Instead of focusing on how to do carbon capture and keep living the way we are, we should focus on preparing society for the inevitable global-warming-in-a-world-with-less-energy. Which means we have to do less with less. AI is the exact opposite, so we are clearly accelerating in the other direction.

Carbon capture is interesting research, but if feels like it assumes a world with more energy than today (because you need energy for the capture), and clean. We're most likely not going there in the timeline we are looking at (the problems have already started, we don't have 200 years to discover a new energy).

fulafel2• 1 year ago

AI energy use is a possible future risk if not addressed, but a much bigger problem we have is the massive wasteful fossils use in electricity generation (used for non-IT things) and transport.

We need to get everybody much below the Europe line here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Tackling AI comes automatically from the required policy to rapidly ramp down fossils use. (For example cap-and-trade applied to electricity market transferring the emissions quota to electricity prices)

bobfromhuddle3• 1 year ago

I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get out of jail free card".

I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative.

The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.

chris_va3• 1 year ago

Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too.

You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.

fulafel2• 1 year ago

Aren't there also carbon neutral ways to make cement/concrete?

bayindirh• 1 year ago

Capturing something back is more costly than not emitting in the first place. News at 22.

totallynothoney• 1 year ago

This obviously is not viable for X, Y, etc. reasons but I would like to know them. We select some fast growing woody plant that thrives on terrain useless for agriculture, we grow it at industrial scale and convert it to charcoal (using the energy generated for the process itself or the grid), we grind the charcoal and mix it with sea water and pump the slurry into some mine.

Creating charcoal and taking out of the cycle isn't actually net negative? We don't have enough space for growing or in mineshafts? I'm making Centralia 2.0? It's obviously non economic, but everything carbon capture is like that.

sensanaty• 1 year ago

I am the furthest thing from an expert on this, but isn't the majority of natural CO2 capture done by Algae?

sweeter2• 1 year ago

"don't worry, don't worry, once the environment gets unliveable we'll just pull the carbon out of the air. We don't need sustainable resources"

Is a lie on par with:

"I don't need to go to rehab, I can stop at any time" except the oil companies are the drug dealer and you are the deluded addict who will suffer the brunt of the consequence.

whatever1• 1 year ago

Oh no the VCs did not revolutionize thermodynamics?

notatoad• 1 year ago

unfortunately, the only way this is relevant is if we actually price carbon emissions at the rate it costs to capture them. as long as you can emit for free, then switching to renewables is more expensive.

AlexandrB2• 1 year ago

Since this is talking about 2050, why isn't nuclear mentioned? That seems like a long-enough horizon to build a few nuclear plants.

loeg7• 1 year ago

Jacobson is anti-nuclear in a way that is somewhere on a spectrum between pessimistic and dishonest. His prior belief is that 100% wind/solar is the only way to go and all of his research aims to advance that worldview.

krupan• 1 year ago

Are people still including wood and wood pellets as "renewables"? It seems like that would be throwing off any cost calculations

acyou3• 1 year ago

Point capture and atmospheric capture are vastly different processes, economics for point capture are great, economics for atmospheric capture are terrible due to the thermodynamic high energy input inherently required for separating out a low concentration (400 parts per million) substance.

But this article puts both processes in the same category, which perfectly sets up a low-information, divisive debate. Why they would want to do that - well, some people stand to gain a lot from renewable energy program investment, let's put it that way.

lblume3• 1 year ago

some people stand to gain a lot from renewable energy program investment

Yes, everyone in fact.

rank05• 1 year ago

Hate to break it to you but the people producing and selling solar panels don’t give a fuck about the environment. Neither do you.

I feel like Im ruining santa claus…

WalterBright• 1 year ago

The notion of carbon capture always sounded crazy to me.

But there already is a technology to do carbon capture. Plants. Plants cover the world. How does one think a machine could do better?

acyou3• 1 year ago

European home heating using wood pellets is an environmental disaster. Cut down trees in North America, grind them into pellets, pack them in shipping containers, ship them to Europe, and burn them in low efficiency furnaces with zero carbon capture and high particulate and sulfur dioxide emissions. It's probably even worse than home heating using unprocessed wood, due to the massive amount of energy consumed in processing and transportation.

If we can't at least point capture stacks at the individual home level, then forget atmospheric capture.

johnea• 1 year ago

Duh?!

The unasked question though: More costly to who?

Modern capitalism (especially in the enrgy sector) is fundamentally based on externalities.

Getting someone else to bear the cost, while concentrating income as greatly as possible, is what the modern billionaire is all about...

rob_c2• 1 year ago

Does this really. Really?!? Surprise anyone not invested in hyper loop being a thing?

jslezak• 1 year ago

This has been obvious since day 0, for the same reason that doing elaborate industry-funded R&D to develop piss-extraction technology to filter and sequester piss from your swimming pool will never be more efficient than simply not pissing in your pool

Aachen3• 1 year ago

Is it on purpose that the analogy lends itself for arguing "and that's why we need the technology: we won't stop the group that still does this"?

I'm probably more optimistic about global warming than about the other "environment-warming" thing!

sega_sai• 1 year ago

For people in the UK I strongly recommend the BBC program on carbon capture https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00256gj/panorama-can-... that goes over several approaches, and goes over problems of scaling them.

I personally think we have to investigate this, as we are just not doing a good enough job of reducing fossil fuel use.

picafrost• 1 year ago

Energy companies are reporting that the cost situation for renewables is terrible. The thin margins continue to get thinner. They cannot justify pursuing new green projects to shareholders. We will hear a lot more about carbon capture in the years to come. It's the only way they can meet their climate obligations — which are also being "adjusted" these days.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 1 year ago

For electricity, it seems like a no-brainer, but that's not the only emitter. I wonder what cost for carbon capture they used (unfortunately the article is paywalled).

It seems to me like the obvious solution to the problem would be a CO2 tax equal to the estimated cost of carbon capture. It should not be higher - that would be yet another example of moralism that plagues so many environmental policies. Introduce that, properly monitor emissions (especially things like methane leaks), and the problem will quickly solve itself. Anything that remains is the edge cases where it is more economical to do carbon capture - so use the tax to do just that.

That also covers cases where it makes sense to do the change more slowly. No need to decide or argue back and forth whether someone can or cannot do it faster. You emit, you pay, you don't want to pay, you don't emit. Changing quickly is too costly? That's fine, you pay. Oh, it's not that costly when compared to the tax? Guess you change, then. Also fine. Want to generate electricity from lignite? I'm not going to argue, I'm just going to watch you go bankrupt... and if you don't, there probably was some good reason for doing that and forcing the opposite would have had some unintended side effects.

mhh__• 1 year ago

Is it dearer than storage though? my understanding was always that carbon capture if worth doing at all is for situations where the wind isn't blowing and the sun is dim (this nearly led to blackouts in uk recently)

cbmuser• 1 year ago

Renewables like wind and solar don’t provide baseload and therefore cannot replace conventional power plants.

I wish people stopped comparing apples and oranges here.

Mathnerd314• 1 year ago

If scenarios with different mixes of CC/DAC and WWS were performed, it would not be possible to conclude whether one is an opportunity cost. Instead, using a mixture requires assuming that both CC/DAC and WWS should be used before determining whether one has any benefit relative to the other.

Seems stupid - they are both being used, so even the business-as-usual scenario is a mixture. If indeed the 100% WWS + 0% CC/DAC scenario is better than than the 95% WWS + 5% CC/DAC scenario, then it is logical to conclude that CC/DAC is useless, but according to the tables and figures, they didn't even look at whether a 50/50 WWS + CC/DAC split would be better or worse. Yet their conclusion is still "policies promoting CC and SDACC should be abandoned". They have these really complex models but at the end of the day it is garbage in, garbage out.

yigalirani• 1 year ago

how about growing fast trees. then bury them?

nkmnz• 1 year ago

Comparing two extremes Jacobson and co-authors compared the annual energy costs, emissions, public health impacts, and social costs associated with implementing either of two extremes across all sectors in 149 countries over the next 25 years.
One extreme would see a complete switch to using heat and electricity generated by wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower for all energy needs (...)
The other extreme would see countries maintain their current reliance on fossil fuels with some renewables, nuclear, and biomass (...)

The study might be well intentioned, but since none of the two scenarios has a probability that is different from 0, its use for policy makers, investors, and voters might be very little. In reality, it will always be a mix of both approaches, not because I'm "the truth lies in the middle" kind of guy, but simply because there might be local optimizations found along the way that favor one or the other approach (or both at the same time) based on local and temporal considerations with regard to the financial, technological, political, social, ecological, and cultural conditions.

mollerhoj• 1 year ago

Genuine question: I run a co2 calculator site. where should I redirect donations for maximum impact?

darthrupert• 1 year ago

Could we use the technology that has been established hundreds of millions of years ago? You know, trees.

jmatthews• 1 year ago

I would like to post this respectfully, just for posterity. The anti science insular concepts being assumed as fact, the discredited overpopulation theories, the sky is falling parts of climate change.

I can't credibly participate because from my perspective what is being discussed is a popular sci-fi series that I haven't read. The dogmas and rituals are alien to me.

mariconrobot• 1 year ago

easer to change what you eat rather than to capture the stinky farts

aeturnum• 1 year ago

Carbon capture is certainly more expensive than renewables but this headline presents a false dichotomy. The question isn't if we capture carbon instead of switching to renewables - that ship sailed long ago - the question is if we need carbon capture in addition to switching to renewables.

klysm• 1 year ago

It’s kind of trivially true right? The problem is we are on a path to have a shitload of carbon in the atmosphere so we better figure out how to get it out starting now

singingfish• 1 year ago

In other news, water is wet and the sun rises every morning.

vrighter• 1 year ago

well yeah.... one gives you energy and reduces carbon emissions, The other takes energy and reduces a tiny bit of co2

Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find

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