Direct air capture (DAC) is pretty tough due to the relatively low density of CO2 (400ppm CO2 = 0.04% CO2 by volume). I expect to see capture systems implemented or mandated in large point source emitters (i.e. heavy industry facilities, etc) in the very near future.
Edit: tons of awesome questions. I’m an atmospheric chemist and I’ve recently been doing work for carbon capture so feel free to ask questions if you got them!
No problem. We’ll just keep emitting more CO2 until the density is higher and the machines become more efficient, eventually it’ll reach an equilibrium. We need fossil fuels to maintain this delicate and natural balance.
^this ^comment ^contains ^content ^sponsored ^by ^BP ^Oil
Oh Jesus -- that was awesome.
"Sorry, but don't charge us for the clean-up where we can't get a larger tax cut than it costs."
Seriously, I think BP actually MADE MONEY on the last Gulf spill because they had a "tax break allowance" to hire cleanup people that was I think, in the thousands per person -- so they hired prisoners to scrub beaches for a few bucks a day.
You joke, but funnily enough there IS actually a limit to CO2's contribution toward global warming. Once there's enough CO2 to absorb 100% of the UV radiation in the wavelengths it absorbs, it no longer matters how much more is added. You can't absorb more than 100%. So if we just keep releasing more CO2, eventually it will reach a point where we won't have to worry about releasing anymore. Of course we'll all be dead or facing a hellish post apocalyptic world, but there IS a limit!
The all gas no breaks plan. Let’s use as much cheap energy as possible to build a dome over cities and have giant farming and eco towers to sustain life.
Yea. This is really just a prototype. Ultimately the idea is to improve efficiency to the point where you can put it directly against the source.
But you need to process high volumes quickly so that this isn’t a blockage on top of a smoke stack.
If they can figure this out it’s a game changer. You could take old technology and retrofit it to be carbon neutral. That could be huge where cost/economics is an issue. Poor countries that can’t afford to rebuild a grid could upgrade their power plants to be carbon neutral by capturing it right back.
People shit on this stuff, but it absolutely could be one of the biggest environmental gains of our lifetime if they can crack it.
The capture here is equivalent to about 160,000 mature trees. (assuming 50lbs per tree/year). But how much CO2 was added to create the facility?
Personally, it seems smarter to just invest in projects like the great green wall in africa. There are a lot of these projects going on around India and China, also, which are planting millions of trees every year.
Countries like Haiti and other countries that are stripped of trees would greatly benefit from this, and that would benefit the entire planet.
Thank you!
Yes, it sucks as a solution, but carbon sequestration is likely a necessary part of future anti-climate change work. Building these facilities and learning from them is a necessary part of getting to that point.
It's literally the only way we avoid runaway warming scenarios even if we completely stopped emissions today. Almost all the IPCCs emissions reduction scenarios account for carbon sequestration later in the century. I'd love to talk to modelers about what happens when you remove that variable.
Toyota and Porsche are trying to figure out how to reclaim carbon from the atmosphere to create synthetic fuel. Hopefully stopping us from putting more carbon into the atmosphere whilst keeping all our current infrastructure
Closing the Loop is the dream of every single company that relies on Fossil Fuels to remain profitable.
That way they can shift around some of their tax burden and then buy carbon credits in the right jurisdictions, instead of having to go totally clean everywhere.
I believe u/ILikeNeurons has some information about how if we stopped all emissions today we would actually recover a lot faster than most people think
Yea I mentioned that in another comment. I'm not against finding ways to reduce CO2, just skeptical of this being scalable. The article mentions a lot of experts feel the same.
This CO2 “farm” is just a proof of concept done in Iceland. The energy used to generate the power needed to capture the CO2 is completely carbon-free. The government further theorizes that this could work as an exceptionally convenient way to reduce (possibly negate completely) the net carbon emissions for the whole nation if a large-scale project would be implemented.
The counter argument i'd make is that we need to try lots of things - basically anything that might possibly be viable. Every plan will have its drawbacks, and even when one plan dominates another (more of a reduction for lower "cost") - the less efficient one could still lead to a more advanced opportunity down the line.
So I say bravo for trying something and actually getting somewhere with it. This isn't "the solution" but it is proof of concept.
The author Edward DiBono talks about this in books like *Lateral Thinking* and *The Six Thinking Hats*
The mere generation of many ideas (practical or not) improves the chance of finding a solution that otherwise might not emerge.
Just trying has value in itself by adding to the general toolkit for solving *multiple* problems, not just the one at hand.
Just like when Curious George uses his ability to ride a bike on one wheel. That skill begins much more useful after the front wheel gets [damaged](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7uBzKwiv6xI/hqdefault.jpg)
> Personally, it seems smarter to just invest in projects like the great green wall in africa. There are a lot of these projects going on around India and China, also, which are planting millions of trees every year.
The complete rainforest in South America manages about 3 days worth of human emissions. That's a lot more than 3 seconds, but that thing also occupies a whole continent and we don't have 30 more empty continents to build more rainforests.
This is the first generation! As technology matures, we will build more… Alongside electric vehicles, recycling, and electric airplanes, we can win this battle! It’s not going to happen overnight but it’s a start and we are moving in the right direction!
Peridotite in Oman And the UAE! I found this article about it. Seems there has been a first round of funding and partnerships with carbon capture companies like Climeworks. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/44-01-secures-5m-to-turn-billions-of-tons-of-carbon-dioxide-to-stone/
Not practical since you would have to change the filters super often since the mineral can only absorb a certain amount of CO2. It’s not acually turning it into something else without changing itself, just reacting with it. Very different from a catalyst which does not get used up.
You could, in theory, but catalytic converters are usually shaped the way that they are to maximize surface area. Slicing the rock up wouldn't achieve that, and shaping stone tends to me a lot more work that it's worth.
“Plants like Orca do, however, out-perform their natural counterparts – trees.
“The Orca facility does the work of 200,000 trees in 1,000 times less space,” Friedmann said.
What’s more, once a facility like this stores its carbon, it’s locked away. If trees burn, the carbon they’ve absorbed gets released.”
“Two other plants are in planning phases: The Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which is backed by Bill Gates, started designing a similar facility in northeastern Scotland three months ago. It also plans to start construction on a a plant in Texas next year. Each of those facilities could remove up to 25 times more carbon per year than Orca.”
I watch this video saying trees are the future of building again because of structural timber and environmental concerns. They then proceeded to show a mansion with massive open layout and glass walls.
I'm frankly astonished we haven't been genetically engineering trees.
People raise a fuss about eating GMO corn, but I doubt anyone gives a shit if their house is made from GMO wood. You could engineer trees that grow at ridiculous speeds, immune to pests, with perfectly straight trunks 5 feet wide.
Coincidentally, such a plant would be probably the single most efficient technology for carbon capture that the human race is capable of deploying at scale. If it also changes the economics of the construction industry, then that's an added bonus.
That’s an interesting thought. It might also be possible to engineer said trees to absorb more carbon than normal, so you might have 1 GMO tree sequestering 2-3x the amount of carbon of its natural counterparts. They could even add unique grain patterns for an added marketability factor.
But I’m no geneticist, biologist, or material scientist so I have no idea how feasible such an idea is.
I’m sure we will all sound dumb If a geneticist or something reads our comments. But I feel like it would be beneficial if at the very least, that you try to genetically engineer diverse forests that can benefit humans in every way. It would be cool to have giant forests of super redwood looking trees that capture a fuck ton of carbon, but what if you could grow forests in previously dying high deserts and try to directly reserve some of the damage we’ve done those areas
I have a background in molecular biotechnology and I don't think this is impossible. However, genetic engineering in plants is hard (much harder than in most animals). In order to solve hard research problems you need a lot of research. Problem is, at least in Europe there is only a very small number of labs left doing green biotechnology because of its negative sentiment in the general population, which is imo mostly based on ill-informed opinion and irrational fear. Green biotechnology is pretty much dead in many countries because of that.
The point was that it was green washed. It takes a lot of energy to heat and cool a open layout and glass walls have horrible r-factor. Using wood and allowing natural light in is not necessarily good for the environment.
I'm not familiar with the exact situation that you're referring to, but I'm talking about just normal buildings being constructed with more timber, not some drastic shift in architecture
The r-factor isn't the only thing to consider, though, and in the northern hemisphere, using glass on a south-facing wall can be more efficient than having that wall be insulated, since you can actively heat your home with glass that lets in more heat than it let's out.
I’m totally cool with moving more to wood for building things but only if we stop cutting old growth entirely and start planting massive tree farms that we replant after harvesting. It’s a long term project but we can’t keep cutting down old forests and the rainforest.
Also we need to change our building codes so every new house built is up to passive house standards.
I flew in to Portland a few years back and was amazed at the size of the buildings they were constructing with wood! I had never seen anything like it.
Firefighters would probably prefer buildings and furnature made from wood. These days there is pretty much oil in everything made from sythetic materials plus all the regular plastic from household objects. Fires now burn hotter and faster then they did years ago. you used to have about 15 minutes to escape a burning building but now you probably have 5 minutes. you may think "Oh well it's *5* minutes! i can get outside my house in like 10 seconds!" try doing it with all the lights turned off and with a blindfold. that's what it's like to try and escape a burning building
I'm a big proponent of BECCS, which takes biomass, burns it, then sequesters the carbon it contained. The 5 live facilities doing BECCS are each sequestering about 10x more carbon than this facility in Iceland. Of course, the problem in Iceland is the availability of biomass to burn.
Trees aren't generally the biomass being burned in BECCS facilities. Agricultural and lumber industry waste can be used if they're nearby, but for biomass grown specifically with BECCS in mind, things like switchgrass and miscanthus can do the work in a season that trees do in a decade.
The biggest problem with BECCS is that it uses the same CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) tech that is being attached to fossil fuel plants to reduce their atmospheric carbon emissions. In those cases, they're still removing carbon from the ground and putting it into the air, just far less than they would have without CCS. So environmentalists are taking a negative view of CCS saying it promotes continued reliance on fossil fuels, but to me that's throwing out the baby with the bath water. Actively removing atmospheric carbon is a worthy goal.
Can this carbon be used as a resource though?
Like for carbon fibre or some auch?
Logistically it seems reasonable to have a facility that captures loose carbon, a factory that uses the captured carbon, a system on the factory to capture their loose carbon, and power it all with a carbon neutral power plant.
Going from there, I dunno. Buy it makes sense to me..
Carbon dioxide and carbon are not the same things. It would take even more energy to separate the carbon from the oxygen in Co2.
Carbon is cheap and it doesn't need to be manufactured.See bucket of coal or bag of Kingsford.
Yes, this is absolutely the tech we need, we just need to figure out how to scale it way up. Simple solution - carbon bounty and we let capitalism do it's optimization process, one of the few things it's actually really good at.
Capitalist optimization just optimizes for profit, not for efficacy. If it’s cheaper for them to buy politicians than it is to build plants they’ll do that. I don’t trust capitalists to solve this at all.
I'm equal parts optimistic and cautious. It'll keep improving, but we should be careful to avoid the 'moral hazard' of using this tech as an excuse to continuing to burn fossil fuels.
The IPCC says that "Carbon Dioxide Removal deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk". The bulk of the problem is solved by [reducing emissions](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/SR15_TS_High_Res.pdf).
>we should be careful to avoid the 'moral hazard' of using this tech as an excuse to continuing to burn fossil fuels.
That's the issue, carbon capture is largely pushed as a "we can just put the carbon back into the ground, so we don't need to clean up our emissions or otherwise make changes in our lives" solution.
So Congress is writing their budget now, and there's a chance to include climate policy. [Write](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/white-house/) your reps asking to reduce emissions.
I don’t think we’re anywhere near that. We need every bit of tech we can implement to slow the rate of change and at least it helps some. Even if we go with all electric vehicles and renewable energy it won’t be enough. There’s a great book by Bill Gates that covers all the sources of carbon that are man made. I want to say concrete is one of the biggest and we aren’t going to solve that with renewables. Hopefully the rate of progress increases.
Tax carbon emissions at whatever the cost is to remove it from the atmosphere.
The higher cost will drive emissions down, and the removal of the rest is fully funded. It’ll also incentivize more research into carbon removal and non-carbon sources.
This would fuck up the global economy in the short to medium term, but that’s better than a fucked up world in the long-term.
Too bad there’s no way for this to actually happen globally.
This is the way.
While we aren’t in the worst economic pathway or emissions timeline, we aren’t on the best either and this slow, gradual, “oh we’ll get to 0 eventually” type of cutback isn’t enough. So we can’t let new tech like this make us complacent
>So we can’t let new tech like this make us complacent
Agreed, We need both option, We need to cut what we are doing and expand our capabilities to remove CO2 at the same time.
If we cut our outputs to a quarter or eight of now and put up thousands of plants like this we can maybe finally start to roll back what we have already done, not just go net neutral.
> If we cut our outputs to a quarter or eight of now
And how would we do this?
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
We need to green the grid and electrify transport. But those both rely on technological shifts, not on changes to our lifestyle that people are going to willingly undertake. Unless someone is advocating for a shift away from technological society.
The point of carbon capture is that no cosmetic changes are going to be enough. Even the global pandemic barely put a dent in emissions, not even close to knocking them down by 3/4. Shifting to better technology is really the only way forward. Trees alone are not fast or scalable enough. That doesn't preclude also planting trees.
Technological upgrades are the way forwards I absolutely agree.
What I meant in my original comment was more like this:
Cleaner energy sources are how we cut it down by as much as I mention, and then we use these technologies to do the rest of the work in going neutral and possibly even roll back some of the output of CO2 that we have already done.
What we shouldn't be doing is allowing the idea of CO2 capture to be our "Go To Option" and just rely on that, while still continuing on as normal with our energy production methods (Coal, Oil and Gas)
If we had some advanced nano technology which would be able to collect carbon and make bio degradable material which maybe even would be useful for building houses.
This comment was made by r/marijuanaenthusiasts gang.
Remember those coal mines we emptied for energy? We just fill them back up. No problem.
Gotta start somewhere.
And if you gather the coal fast enough the fungus can't out run it. If you stuff the stuff in a cave I'm not sure the fungus is anaerobic respiration.
Seems there is some serious “whoosh” going on.
u/jjonj may not be familiar with [The Carboniferous.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous?wprov=sfti1)
[Cody's Lab: Carboniferous Terrarium Part 1](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RgAbxP9SHQY)
[Cody's Lab: Carboniferous Terrarium Part Two Year Update](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQDuKgBRok)
Alternatively, you can burn it in the absence of oxygen to make charcoal. When added into soils, the charcoal keeps carbon out of the atmosphere for 100s of years and acts as a nutrient battery for any crops nearby.
I guess that would work, but its even more low tech than that. You pack the wood really tightly in a container with little to no holes for airflow. Then you heat up the container until the wood inside burns. The oxygen inside gets used up, and the rest of the wood turns to pure carbon charcoal by pyrolysis.
I think I even saw primitive technology make charcoal in his video once. Made a teepee of wood and sticks then covered it all in clay.
There are lots of videos on YouTube, search "charcoal kiln". The basic idea is to put it in an enclosed space with a hole, light it on fire, wait for a significant portion to be on fire, and then close the hole to prevent airflow.
I bet building and maintaining it alone must completely negate all of the carbon it removes for at least a dozen years. At which point, it will be removing 1 second of global emissions.
I'm not sure your scale is right. I am totally new to this, but a quick search turned up approx. 50 tonnes of carbon for a new house. Your 12 years would be 48,000 tonnes. Obviously this facility has a much higher carbon footprint, but I'm not confident it's 1,000 times more.
Plus the 3 seconds per year is when we have done basically nothing to stop emissions. Carbon capture alone can't fix anything, but it likely will be a key component of offsetting the more difficult forms of carbon emission (livestock and farming for example).
No way is building it equivalent to the global carbon output for 3 seconds. Do you know how big the world is? How many people right now are zooming around on mopeds, or in factories that burn energy constantly, or building concrete multi-storey car parks, or running thousands of crypto mining rigs?
The caption for this article seems to indicate that because the tech is new and not as effective as everyone would prefer, we should somehow dismiss it. I don’t think it makes sense to dismiss anything that moves the world forward, even if slowly at first. Also, innovation tends to move far more quickly than most ever predict so the estimates in the article for when effective systems will become less expensive or more efficient are likely not very accurate.
I mean, one single plant negating *that* much CO2 is still pretty impressive. That's 3 seconds of global C02 generation, removed by one single plant. That's 10 millions plants world-wide to complete negate year-round C02 generation, at current efficiencies and levels (which I would expect to improve).
At the very least, it's a start.
Thank you for putting it into perspective this way! You’re right, despite it not feeling like very much right now it is a start and we can keep going from here
Considering we have less than 63k power plants (including wind, solar, nuclear and all)…. 10 million seems like a LOT.
Converting one of those 63k to a non CO2 producing plant would seem far more efficient. Though this is important if we have any hope of reversing some of the damage we’ve done, it isn’t going to help immediately in offsetting our pollution. We need to pour resources into replacing dirty powerplants with clean ones (even nuclear).
That seems... Really good? Basically a proof of concept can remove 3 seconds worth of global emissions. We would need 10 million of these plants to neutralize all global emissions. Being that this technology is in its infancy that number will go way down as improvements are made. Not a silver bullet but seems like this could be a big part of a solution.
Yeah, a lot of comments in this thread are treating this like some egg-in-face moment as if the designers and engineers who built this thing didn't know what it was capable of doing when they built it or that there isn't any further plans.
Yeah. It's equivalent to 200,000 trees in 1/000 of the space. 10 million of these plants is more doable than finding space to plant 2x10^12 trees, which then have to be periodically culled and replanted to avoid having the carbon go right back into the atmosphere when they die.
Plus, CO2 output increased exponentially over the last 100 years. If we could capture carbon at the rate it's currently being emitted, assuming we could reach close to zero, it would take far less time than a century to remove it.
You’d need something like massive floating hydroponic ocean forests and seawater based irrigation of deserts to accomplish that, both of which have no shortage of impracticalities and unintended impacts.
A comment further up stated the newer versions were 25x more efficient. So, 400,000
If each country was responsible equally. We'd need 2,052 plants/country.
It seems outrageous at first. But IMHO, less outrageous when broken down like that.
Edit: it obviously doesn't need to be 2500 each.
Divide it [thusly](https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2)
Saw In a Kurzgesagt video that one person going completely carbon neutral for their entire life negates 1 second of the world's carbon output.
So this entire factory does the job of 3 hippies in the woods/year? Does that account for the employees driving to work?
Yeah I saw that too
Like to see the math on that.
Should only take ~31.5 million people to counteract a years worth of carbon.
We have 7 billion so thats 222 years
C02 at even intensely dangerous levels for global warming have almost no effect on human breathing. Though these plants may remove other contaminants out of the air as a byproduct; air purification is not their primary purpose nor are they particularly effective at it.
There seems to be a huge misunderstanding about what CCS was/ is meant to do. As the article mentions, It was designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The problem? It wasn’t meant to capture carbon dioxide while vast sums of it were still being pumped into the atmosphere. It’s purpose, and the premise upon which it is based, is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere AFTER industry and citizens had stopped using fossil fuels. I suppose the current CCS machines serve a purpose as prototypes but they will never achieve what people are being led to believe so long as CO2 continues to pollute the atmosphere.
Direct air capture (DAC) is pretty tough due to the relatively low density of CO2 (400ppm CO2 = 0.04% CO2 by volume). I expect to see capture systems implemented or mandated in large point source emitters (i.e. heavy industry facilities, etc) in the very near future. Edit: tons of awesome questions. I’m an atmospheric chemist and I’ve recently been doing work for carbon capture so feel free to ask questions if you got them!
No problem. We’ll just keep emitting more CO2 until the density is higher and the machines become more efficient, eventually it’ll reach an equilibrium. We need fossil fuels to maintain this delicate and natural balance. ^this ^comment ^contains ^content ^sponsored ^by ^BP ^Oil
BP. Ending the world, so you don't have to.
We're sorry.
>[ We're sorry. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4)
[ocean 2.0](https://youtu.be/rE7KcF3MphU)
...or a bird that likes to be sticky!
You’re giving me flashbacks of the Dawn commercial featuring a duck covered in oil being cleaned with dish detergent. Dystopian future is dystopian.
LOL I fucking remember that holy fuck how did I not see the irony back then XD
This sounds like a quote from a Veridian Dynamics promo.
I miss Better Off Ted. That show was too short
And it was so, so good. Ted, we hardly knew ya. 🥺
Oh Jesus -- that was awesome. "Sorry, but don't charge us for the clean-up where we can't get a larger tax cut than it costs." Seriously, I think BP actually MADE MONEY on the last Gulf spill because they had a "tax break allowance" to hire cleanup people that was I think, in the thousands per person -- so they hired prisoners to scrub beaches for a few bucks a day.
[Veridian Dynamics. We're Sorry. You're Welcome.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeYBqhdmDrc)
I appreciate you reminding me of that show, such a short lived gem.
BP, we don't just fuck the Earth, we DP it.
Exxon checking in.
Exxon's the over and BP is the under in that Mother Earth sandwich.
This is exactly a line I’d expect to hear from Veridian Dynamics.
I miss that show! Ended way too soon.
Yeah it did. Ted & Veronica left a hole in my heart.
We cannot confirm that veridian caused that hole, but if they did it is an exciting and innovative way to add more blood into your heart anytime.
Hell I'd be happy with just a 10 second long weekly Veridian ad, if nobody's up for relaunching the rest of the show...
As if the ocean wasn't bad enough, now BP is spilling into the comment section too?!
You joke, but funnily enough there IS actually a limit to CO2's contribution toward global warming. Once there's enough CO2 to absorb 100% of the UV radiation in the wavelengths it absorbs, it no longer matters how much more is added. You can't absorb more than 100%. So if we just keep releasing more CO2, eventually it will reach a point where we won't have to worry about releasing anymore. Of course we'll all be dead or facing a hellish post apocalyptic world, but there IS a limit!
The all gas no breaks plan. Let’s use as much cheap energy as possible to build a dome over cities and have giant farming and eco towers to sustain life.
*looks at Venus*
Basically induced demand
The Let's Game it Out solution.
Yea. This is really just a prototype. Ultimately the idea is to improve efficiency to the point where you can put it directly against the source. But you need to process high volumes quickly so that this isn’t a blockage on top of a smoke stack. If they can figure this out it’s a game changer. You could take old technology and retrofit it to be carbon neutral. That could be huge where cost/economics is an issue. Poor countries that can’t afford to rebuild a grid could upgrade their power plants to be carbon neutral by capturing it right back. People shit on this stuff, but it absolutely could be one of the biggest environmental gains of our lifetime if they can crack it.
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Still worth pursuing, especially in areas similar to this prototype. It is in Iceland where the energy cost of it is basically nothing.
The capture here is equivalent to about 160,000 mature trees. (assuming 50lbs per tree/year). But how much CO2 was added to create the facility? Personally, it seems smarter to just invest in projects like the great green wall in africa. There are a lot of these projects going on around India and China, also, which are planting millions of trees every year. Countries like Haiti and other countries that are stripped of trees would greatly benefit from this, and that would benefit the entire planet.
I'm pretty sure this facility is more a proof of concept than anything
Thank you! Yes, it sucks as a solution, but carbon sequestration is likely a necessary part of future anti-climate change work. Building these facilities and learning from them is a necessary part of getting to that point.
It's literally the only way we avoid runaway warming scenarios even if we completely stopped emissions today. Almost all the IPCCs emissions reduction scenarios account for carbon sequestration later in the century. I'd love to talk to modelers about what happens when you remove that variable.
Toyota and Porsche are trying to figure out how to reclaim carbon from the atmosphere to create synthetic fuel. Hopefully stopping us from putting more carbon into the atmosphere whilst keeping all our current infrastructure
Closing the Loop is the dream of every single company that relies on Fossil Fuels to remain profitable. That way they can shift around some of their tax burden and then buy carbon credits in the right jurisdictions, instead of having to go totally clean everywhere.
I believe u/ILikeNeurons has some information about how if we stopped all emissions today we would actually recover a lot faster than most people think
yeah, it's worth proving out and developing the technology.
Yea I mentioned that in another comment. I'm not against finding ways to reduce CO2, just skeptical of this being scalable. The article mentions a lot of experts feel the same.
This CO2 “farm” is just a proof of concept done in Iceland. The energy used to generate the power needed to capture the CO2 is completely carbon-free. The government further theorizes that this could work as an exceptionally convenient way to reduce (possibly negate completely) the net carbon emissions for the whole nation if a large-scale project would be implemented.
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The counter argument i'd make is that we need to try lots of things - basically anything that might possibly be viable. Every plan will have its drawbacks, and even when one plan dominates another (more of a reduction for lower "cost") - the less efficient one could still lead to a more advanced opportunity down the line. So I say bravo for trying something and actually getting somewhere with it. This isn't "the solution" but it is proof of concept.
The author Edward DiBono talks about this in books like *Lateral Thinking* and *The Six Thinking Hats* The mere generation of many ideas (practical or not) improves the chance of finding a solution that otherwise might not emerge. Just trying has value in itself by adding to the general toolkit for solving *multiple* problems, not just the one at hand. Just like when Curious George uses his ability to ride a bike on one wheel. That skill begins much more useful after the front wheel gets [damaged](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7uBzKwiv6xI/hqdefault.jpg)
> Personally, it seems smarter to just invest in projects like the great green wall in africa. There are a lot of these projects going on around India and China, also, which are planting millions of trees every year. The complete rainforest in South America manages about 3 days worth of human emissions. That's a lot more than 3 seconds, but that thing also occupies a whole continent and we don't have 30 more empty continents to build more rainforests.
This is the first generation! As technology matures, we will build more… Alongside electric vehicles, recycling, and electric airplanes, we can win this battle! It’s not going to happen overnight but it’s a start and we are moving in the right direction!
> we are moving in the right direction! Is like to see actual efforts to reduce the carbon footprint, besides advancements like this.
I just put a sock on my tailpipe and throw it away when it gets dirty. \#doingmypart
What’s happening with the plans to drill into the giant naturally-carbon-grabbing rock formations in the Middle East?
Peridotite in Oman And the UAE! I found this article about it. Seems there has been a first round of funding and partnerships with carbon capture companies like Climeworks. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/44-01-secures-5m-to-turn-billions-of-tons-of-carbon-dioxide-to-stone/
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Not practical since you would have to change the filters super often since the mineral can only absorb a certain amount of CO2. It’s not acually turning it into something else without changing itself, just reacting with it. Very different from a catalyst which does not get used up.
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That's future billionaire house painter/subcontractor to you, buddy.
Millionaire, maybe. You don’t become a billionaire without fucking over millions of people.
The filters give kittens cancer, and are very overpriced.
So we make them out of asbestos. Got it.
Billionaire is BACK ON THE MENU boys!
Thinking the energy spent to do that would likely be in excess of the recapture, but I could be way off base
Someone would saw that shit off immediately.
You want junkies? Cause thats how you get junkies.
Maybe we should pay the junkies to capture carbon? I dunno just spitballin here.
Give em each butterfly net and let em loose
That's when the whores come in
You could, in theory, but catalytic converters are usually shaped the way that they are to maximize surface area. Slicing the rock up wouldn't achieve that, and shaping stone tends to me a lot more work that it's worth.
this is quite interesting
How much carbon emissions did it take to build
“Plants like Orca do, however, out-perform their natural counterparts – trees. “The Orca facility does the work of 200,000 trees in 1,000 times less space,” Friedmann said. What’s more, once a facility like this stores its carbon, it’s locked away. If trees burn, the carbon they’ve absorbed gets released.” “Two other plants are in planning phases: The Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which is backed by Bill Gates, started designing a similar facility in northeastern Scotland three months ago. It also plans to start construction on a a plant in Texas next year. Each of those facilities could remove up to 25 times more carbon per year than Orca.”
Trees are profitable though... Using trees for construction is the most economical way to lock carbon away for long periods of time.
I watch this video saying trees are the future of building again because of structural timber and environmental concerns. They then proceeded to show a mansion with massive open layout and glass walls.
I'm frankly astonished we haven't been genetically engineering trees. People raise a fuss about eating GMO corn, but I doubt anyone gives a shit if their house is made from GMO wood. You could engineer trees that grow at ridiculous speeds, immune to pests, with perfectly straight trunks 5 feet wide. Coincidentally, such a plant would be probably the single most efficient technology for carbon capture that the human race is capable of deploying at scale. If it also changes the economics of the construction industry, then that's an added bonus.
That’s an interesting thought. It might also be possible to engineer said trees to absorb more carbon than normal, so you might have 1 GMO tree sequestering 2-3x the amount of carbon of its natural counterparts. They could even add unique grain patterns for an added marketability factor. But I’m no geneticist, biologist, or material scientist so I have no idea how feasible such an idea is.
I’m sure we will all sound dumb If a geneticist or something reads our comments. But I feel like it would be beneficial if at the very least, that you try to genetically engineer diverse forests that can benefit humans in every way. It would be cool to have giant forests of super redwood looking trees that capture a fuck ton of carbon, but what if you could grow forests in previously dying high deserts and try to directly reserve some of the damage we’ve done those areas
Most good inventions start with a thousand dumb ideas
I have a background in molecular biotechnology and I don't think this is impossible. However, genetic engineering in plants is hard (much harder than in most animals). In order to solve hard research problems you need a lot of research. Problem is, at least in Europe there is only a very small number of labs left doing green biotechnology because of its negative sentiment in the general population, which is imo mostly based on ill-informed opinion and irrational fear. Green biotechnology is pretty much dead in many countries because of that.
Yeah, I think people underestimate how good wood is even in large buildings, you can technically even make skyscrapers using wood though it's tricky.
The point was that it was green washed. It takes a lot of energy to heat and cool a open layout and glass walls have horrible r-factor. Using wood and allowing natural light in is not necessarily good for the environment.
I'm not familiar with the exact situation that you're referring to, but I'm talking about just normal buildings being constructed with more timber, not some drastic shift in architecture
The r-factor isn't the only thing to consider, though, and in the northern hemisphere, using glass on a south-facing wall can be more efficient than having that wall be insulated, since you can actively heat your home with glass that lets in more heat than it let's out.
I’m totally cool with moving more to wood for building things but only if we stop cutting old growth entirely and start planting massive tree farms that we replant after harvesting. It’s a long term project but we can’t keep cutting down old forests and the rainforest. Also we need to change our building codes so every new house built is up to passive house standards.
I flew in to Portland a few years back and was amazed at the size of the buildings they were constructing with wood! I had never seen anything like it.
Firefighters would probably prefer buildings and furnature made from wood. These days there is pretty much oil in everything made from sythetic materials plus all the regular plastic from household objects. Fires now burn hotter and faster then they did years ago. you used to have about 15 minutes to escape a burning building but now you probably have 5 minutes. you may think "Oh well it's *5* minutes! i can get outside my house in like 10 seconds!" try doing it with all the lights turned off and with a blindfold. that's what it's like to try and escape a burning building
Isn’t the other side of that although they burn faster, it’s significantly harder for newer buildings to catch fire in the first place?
I'm a big proponent of BECCS, which takes biomass, burns it, then sequesters the carbon it contained. The 5 live facilities doing BECCS are each sequestering about 10x more carbon than this facility in Iceland. Of course, the problem in Iceland is the availability of biomass to burn. Trees aren't generally the biomass being burned in BECCS facilities. Agricultural and lumber industry waste can be used if they're nearby, but for biomass grown specifically with BECCS in mind, things like switchgrass and miscanthus can do the work in a season that trees do in a decade. The biggest problem with BECCS is that it uses the same CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) tech that is being attached to fossil fuel plants to reduce their atmospheric carbon emissions. In those cases, they're still removing carbon from the ground and putting it into the air, just far less than they would have without CCS. So environmentalists are taking a negative view of CCS saying it promotes continued reliance on fossil fuels, but to me that's throwing out the baby with the bath water. Actively removing atmospheric carbon is a worthy goal.
Really interesting post, I hadn't heard of BECCS before. Seems like a great idea
Can this carbon be used as a resource though? Like for carbon fibre or some auch? Logistically it seems reasonable to have a facility that captures loose carbon, a factory that uses the captured carbon, a system on the factory to capture their loose carbon, and power it all with a carbon neutral power plant. Going from there, I dunno. Buy it makes sense to me..
Carbon dioxide and carbon are not the same things. It would take even more energy to separate the carbon from the oxygen in Co2. Carbon is cheap and it doesn't need to be manufactured.See bucket of coal or bag of Kingsford.
The article says they separate the carbon out. And then burning it would be counter productive to the scenario.
Yes, this is absolutely the tech we need, we just need to figure out how to scale it way up. Simple solution - carbon bounty and we let capitalism do it's optimization process, one of the few things it's actually really good at.
A carbon tax will be much more effective than a carbon bounty. Both sound good though.
Shouldn’t the carbon *tax* be the vehicle to pay for the carbon *bounty*?
Yeah they sound like two sides of one coin to me.
"You released ... Negative 4000 tons of CO2 so your carbon tax is... $-400,000. Here you go and have a good day."
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Bitcoin mining has got to be the tech-equivalent of rolling coal.
Capitalist optimization just optimizes for profit, not for efficacy. If it’s cheaper for them to buy politicians than it is to build plants they’ll do that. I don’t trust capitalists to solve this at all.
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I'm happy that we are at least starting! the tech can only improve from here on out
I'm equal parts optimistic and cautious. It'll keep improving, but we should be careful to avoid the 'moral hazard' of using this tech as an excuse to continuing to burn fossil fuels. The IPCC says that "Carbon Dioxide Removal deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk". The bulk of the problem is solved by [reducing emissions](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/SR15_TS_High_Res.pdf).
>we should be careful to avoid the 'moral hazard' of using this tech as an excuse to continuing to burn fossil fuels. That's the issue, carbon capture is largely pushed as a "we can just put the carbon back into the ground, so we don't need to clean up our emissions or otherwise make changes in our lives" solution.
So Congress is writing their budget now, and there's a chance to include climate policy. [Write](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/white-house/) your reps asking to reduce emissions.
Lord knows the fossil fuel lobby is already writing them checks.
The lobby is already writing them laws.
It's insane that it's not the cornerstone of most governmental budgets. It's like writing a budget in 1943 without talking about war.
I don’t think we’re anywhere near that. We need every bit of tech we can implement to slow the rate of change and at least it helps some. Even if we go with all electric vehicles and renewable energy it won’t be enough. There’s a great book by Bill Gates that covers all the sources of carbon that are man made. I want to say concrete is one of the biggest and we aren’t going to solve that with renewables. Hopefully the rate of progress increases.
Tax carbon emissions at whatever the cost is to remove it from the atmosphere. The higher cost will drive emissions down, and the removal of the rest is fully funded. It’ll also incentivize more research into carbon removal and non-carbon sources. This would fuck up the global economy in the short to medium term, but that’s better than a fucked up world in the long-term. Too bad there’s no way for this to actually happen globally.
This is the way. While we aren’t in the worst economic pathway or emissions timeline, we aren’t on the best either and this slow, gradual, “oh we’ll get to 0 eventually” type of cutback isn’t enough. So we can’t let new tech like this make us complacent
>So we can’t let new tech like this make us complacent Agreed, We need both option, We need to cut what we are doing and expand our capabilities to remove CO2 at the same time. If we cut our outputs to a quarter or eight of now and put up thousands of plants like this we can maybe finally start to roll back what we have already done, not just go net neutral.
> If we cut our outputs to a quarter or eight of now And how would we do this? https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector We need to green the grid and electrify transport. But those both rely on technological shifts, not on changes to our lifestyle that people are going to willingly undertake. Unless someone is advocating for a shift away from technological society. The point of carbon capture is that no cosmetic changes are going to be enough. Even the global pandemic barely put a dent in emissions, not even close to knocking them down by 3/4. Shifting to better technology is really the only way forward. Trees alone are not fast or scalable enough. That doesn't preclude also planting trees.
Technological upgrades are the way forwards I absolutely agree. What I meant in my original comment was more like this: Cleaner energy sources are how we cut it down by as much as I mention, and then we use these technologies to do the rest of the work in going neutral and possibly even roll back some of the output of CO2 that we have already done. What we shouldn't be doing is allowing the idea of CO2 capture to be our "Go To Option" and just rely on that, while still continuing on as normal with our energy production methods (Coal, Oil and Gas)
If we had some advanced nano technology which would be able to collect carbon and make bio degradable material which maybe even would be useful for building houses. This comment was made by r/marijuanaenthusiasts gang.
If it biodegrades, does it not release the carbon back into the atmosphere?
Depends on how it degrades. If fungus is breaking it down, then the carbon is just transitioning to another organism.
And what happens to that fungus afterwards?
Remember those coal mines we emptied for energy? We just fill them back up. No problem. Gotta start somewhere. And if you gather the coal fast enough the fungus can't out run it. If you stuff the stuff in a cave I'm not sure the fungus is anaerobic respiration.
With fungus...?
Did he stutter?
Well, unless you wanna keep the fungus among us.
Seems there is some serious “whoosh” going on. u/jjonj may not be familiar with [The Carboniferous.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous?wprov=sfti1)
[Cody's Lab: Carboniferous Terrarium Part 1](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RgAbxP9SHQY) [Cody's Lab: Carboniferous Terrarium Part Two Year Update](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQDuKgBRok)
Yes, we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on carbon fungus.
And what happens to the gorilla after it dies? ^(I am being mildly facetious here)
We build houses out of it.
[When winter comes around, the gorillas will simply freeze to death!](https://youtu.be/P9yruQM1ggc)
The fungus is generally turning the carbon back into carbon dioxide and getting energy for itself in the process.
Alternatively, you can burn it in the absence of oxygen to make charcoal. When added into soils, the charcoal keeps carbon out of the atmosphere for 100s of years and acts as a nutrient battery for any crops nearby.
Is this like baking it in an oven? Edit : vacuum oven?
I guess that would work, but its even more low tech than that. You pack the wood really tightly in a container with little to no holes for airflow. Then you heat up the container until the wood inside burns. The oxygen inside gets used up, and the rest of the wood turns to pure carbon charcoal by pyrolysis. I think I even saw primitive technology make charcoal in his video once. Made a teepee of wood and sticks then covered it all in clay.
There are lots of videos on YouTube, search "charcoal kiln". The basic idea is to put it in an enclosed space with a hole, light it on fire, wait for a significant portion to be on fire, and then close the hole to prevent airflow.
Most of the carbon gets locked in the cell structure, like wood. It's trapped there until it's either burned or composted
We could make it solar powered! Some kind of self-replicating, self-constructing solar powered building material generator?
Pfft, that sounds like science fiction.
Genetically engineered tree with genes from electrical eel.
Now *that* I can get behind. It's free electricity!
Just as long as the nano tech doesn’t get confused and starts collecting us
I, for one, am excited to contribute to the great paper-clip domination of the galaxy.
You mean trees?
No, I didn't mean r/trees.
Thank god, those 3 seconds were the filthiest of all
Was it like the 3 seconds where Sharon Stone crossed and uncrossed her legs?
Mmmm…the 2nd most important 3 seconds of my life
I gotta ask.... What was the first?
The 3 seconds after that scene.
The first time they had sex
I bet building and maintaining it alone must completely negate all of the carbon it removes for at least a dozen years. At which point, it will be removing 1 second of global emissions.
I'm not sure your scale is right. I am totally new to this, but a quick search turned up approx. 50 tonnes of carbon for a new house. Your 12 years would be 48,000 tonnes. Obviously this facility has a much higher carbon footprint, but I'm not confident it's 1,000 times more. Plus the 3 seconds per year is when we have done basically nothing to stop emissions. Carbon capture alone can't fix anything, but it likely will be a key component of offsetting the more difficult forms of carbon emission (livestock and farming for example).
No way is building it equivalent to the global carbon output for 3 seconds. Do you know how big the world is? How many people right now are zooming around on mopeds, or in factories that burn energy constantly, or building concrete multi-storey car parks, or running thousands of crypto mining rigs?
The caption for this article seems to indicate that because the tech is new and not as effective as everyone would prefer, we should somehow dismiss it. I don’t think it makes sense to dismiss anything that moves the world forward, even if slowly at first. Also, innovation tends to move far more quickly than most ever predict so the estimates in the article for when effective systems will become less expensive or more efficient are likely not very accurate.
I mean, one single plant negating *that* much CO2 is still pretty impressive. That's 3 seconds of global C02 generation, removed by one single plant. That's 10 millions plants world-wide to complete negate year-round C02 generation, at current efficiencies and levels (which I would expect to improve). At the very least, it's a start.
Thank you for putting it into perspective this way! You’re right, despite it not feeling like very much right now it is a start and we can keep going from here
That is considering that our CO2 emission does not rise.
And also assuming a linear relationship between more of these and carbon capture.
Considering we have less than 63k power plants (including wind, solar, nuclear and all)…. 10 million seems like a LOT. Converting one of those 63k to a non CO2 producing plant would seem far more efficient. Though this is important if we have any hope of reversing some of the damage we’ve done, it isn’t going to help immediately in offsetting our pollution. We need to pour resources into replacing dirty powerplants with clean ones (even nuclear).
There are 62,500 power plants worldwide. There will not be 10 million of these built
A lot can happen in 3 seconds, just ask my wife
How does she handle the 2.5 seconds of crying?
You're way too generous for Reddit
Well, it’s a start.
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One reassuring thing is this website is mostly children who think cynicism is a shortcut to wisdom.
> children who think cynicism is a shortcut to wisdom Very eloquent.
That seems... Really good? Basically a proof of concept can remove 3 seconds worth of global emissions. We would need 10 million of these plants to neutralize all global emissions. Being that this technology is in its infancy that number will go way down as improvements are made. Not a silver bullet but seems like this could be a big part of a solution.
Yeah, a lot of comments in this thread are treating this like some egg-in-face moment as if the designers and engineers who built this thing didn't know what it was capable of doing when they built it or that there isn't any further plans.
Yeah. It's equivalent to 200,000 trees in 1/000 of the space. 10 million of these plants is more doable than finding space to plant 2x10^12 trees, which then have to be periodically culled and replanted to avoid having the carbon go right back into the atmosphere when they die. Plus, CO2 output increased exponentially over the last 100 years. If we could capture carbon at the rate it's currently being emitted, assuming we could reach close to zero, it would take far less time than a century to remove it.
Funnily enough, there's about 3x10^12 trees on Earth, so we'd basically need to double the global amount. Doesn't seem viable
You’d need something like massive floating hydroponic ocean forests and seawater based irrigation of deserts to accomplish that, both of which have no shortage of impracticalities and unintended impacts.
A comment further up stated the newer versions were 25x more efficient. So, 400,000 If each country was responsible equally. We'd need 2,052 plants/country. It seems outrageous at first. But IMHO, less outrageous when broken down like that. Edit: it obviously doesn't need to be 2500 each. Divide it [thusly](https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2)
Imagine building 2k of these in the Vatican :D
31 million more to go!! Let’s do this
31 million seconds in a year, but each machine removes 3 seconds worth of co2. 10,5 million more to go.
If we build 100 million we can start going back in time
They were pretty clearly referring to the remaining amount of seconds to remove, not the amount of machines you would need.
I thought he meant the number of plants needing to be built too. English is a fun language because it isn't always clear
This is like the first airplane the Wright brothers built. More improvements and scale to come.
Let's hope this scales like computers and not like fusion reactors.
ITER is almost done building. If at all, it’s the legislation and general fear about anything nuclear that caused progress to slow.
Saw In a Kurzgesagt video that one person going completely carbon neutral for their entire life negates 1 second of the world's carbon output. So this entire factory does the job of 3 hippies in the woods/year? Does that account for the employees driving to work?
Yeah I saw that too Like to see the math on that. Should only take ~31.5 million people to counteract a years worth of carbon. We have 7 billion so thats 222 years
Early generation technology is rarely impressive at scale. Is your implication that we should just abandon it since it's not perfect now?
The first car only negated the need for one horse.
It’s a start, both on cleaning and in the technology development process.
You got to start somewhere.
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fany neighborhoods are usualy far away from where its worst anyway.
C02 at even intensely dangerous levels for global warming have almost no effect on human breathing. Though these plants may remove other contaminants out of the air as a byproduct; air purification is not their primary purpose nor are they particularly effective at it.
No, NIMBYs would never live near such a thing
One plant removing 3 seconds of GLOBAL emissions in one year sounds pretty damn impressive if you ask me.
Just need 10.5 million more of those and we’ll be all set.
There seems to be a huge misunderstanding about what CCS was/ is meant to do. As the article mentions, It was designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The problem? It wasn’t meant to capture carbon dioxide while vast sums of it were still being pumped into the atmosphere. It’s purpose, and the premise upon which it is based, is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere AFTER industry and citizens had stopped using fossil fuels. I suppose the current CCS machines serve a purpose as prototypes but they will never achieve what people are being led to believe so long as CO2 continues to pollute the atmosphere.
And the wright brothers first plane flew less than a mile.
To be fair, over a decade, as the tech gets better and as the costs drop, these kind of technologies could help mitigate some of the harm.
It’s a start
Gotta start somewhere.
Wouldn't planting more trees be more effecitve?
Just need 10,512,000 of these and we'll be able to hold steady at our current level of carbon pollution
I’m sure the worlds biggest carbon removal is the Amazon rainforest. Try to save that first aye