Not to pour too much cold water on this, but aside from the extreme cost -- let's just assume that comes down -- these plants ideally need to be located near specific basalt geological formations and need a substantial freshwater supply (27:1 ratio to captured CO2). So while it is most economical to capture at source power plants it may not be geographically possible. And when they're not located by a source it's 10X less efficient.
Of course. The article doesn't mean nor need to imply that this technology is practical yet, simply to illustrate progress is being made (and it is).
For any technology you can poo-poo the early stages ("This Wright brothers plane can only fly 200 feet," "This computer is the size of a room and costs several years' salary").
The trick is to cut them down at the optimal point (some time before they stop growing) and replant. Then use the wood in a way which won't release the carbon back into the atmosphere: don't burn it or let it rot.
Chemically speaking making trees inert is relatively simple, if you look at polylactic acid or rayon, there are a lot of polymers you can make out of cellulose that are practically non biodegradable (though humorously they are often labeled as biodegradable since they will degrade in specific conditions e.g. ground very finely and mixed with a large volume of other material in a high-temperature industrial digester).
The more CO2 is in atmosphere, the sweeter and less mineral-rich plants become, becoming less beneficial to poisonous to surrounding animals and insects.
The studies I've seen indicate that some grain crops may lose a bit of nutrient density (zinc, iron decreasing by 5-14%) while other crops are unaffected or may increase in nutrition.
>"Moreover, they’ve been able to do it for less than $30 per metric ton of CO2."
If my math is right this means that with ~5% of the cost of the fuel you could offset car emissions to make transportation carbon neutral. Seems quite cheap if that's the case.
This particular solution doesn't scale (most power isn't geothermal and we should just offline coal entirely) but the fact that we're already in the ballpark is at least promising.
but it does create options for a lot of countries lucky enough to have geothermal resources ie, those around the pacific rim, NE africa, east coast US and Italy.
not a lot of driver for domestic electricity production but carbon capture is a world-wide market...
I think calling it a 'plant' may be deceptive. The picture makes it look like a package the size of a dumpster, not quite the size of a shipping container.
Is the byproduct (not sure if it's purified gas or a solid compound) of any industrial or material use?
> Is the byproduct (not sure if it's purified gas or a solid compound) of any industrial or material use?
No. The byproduct is injected back into the ground to be remineralized, hopefully locked up to prevent its re-release into the atmosphere.
EDIT: If you used the byproduct in another process where it eventually would make its way back into the atmosphere, the process would no longer be carbon negative.
"This month, Climeworks installed a unit that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air and transfers it to CarbFix to inject underground. Because CarbFix has been monitoring the injection sites for the last three years, they can be sure there will be no leakage. And once mineralized, the CO2 will remain trapped for thousands or millions of years. This makes the Climeworks-CarbFix system the world’s first verified “negative emissions” plant."
Limestone (calcium carbonate) is even easy to make. You can make it "at home" by dissolving unslaked lime (calcium oxide) in water and blowing bubbles in it with a straw.
The real problem is that calcium oxide is usually converted from limestone via massive calcining, which releases... CO2.
I have seen some efforts at carbon negative cement; that might be an input that could accept this buuuuuut its most likely not as efficient as shoving the CO2 down into the ground with high speed pumps.
I don’t really understand the article cemenet manufacturing releases CO2 because the limestone (CaCO3) is calcinated and turned into lime (CaO) in the process of making cement.
The article says (2nd half the first half just describes a cemenet that isn’t made with limestone) that they capture the CO2 and make more limestone form it I’m guessing by sequestering it lime so in theory it can be carbon neutral (albeit I don’t know where they get the lime from without breaking limestone) but how does it become carbon negative?
Out of curiosity, we would need ~500 of these stations in their current form to offset a typical coal power plant (7.5 thousand tons co2/ year, a claim from Climework's about video, v. 3.5 million tons co2 / year), or about 5-6 million stations to offset global co2 yearly emission (40-45 billion tons co2/ year).
...at the current efficiency levels. Note that this is only their second installation, so don't expect any miracles. The technology will improve, I'm sure.
Wow really? That seems like a small number. Given that aroun 70+ million cars were sold in 2016, we probably have the industrial capacity to offset the yearly emissions.
I wonder how cheap these will get and if they can be deployed en masse easily
They also mention that it is considerably more efficient to capture carbon at the source. The CO2 concentration is about 200 times higher at the plant (10% vs 0.04%). They state that it costs about 1/10 as much to capture at the source.
So extrapolating from that, then the the plant they built in Switzerland, which 900 tonnes/yr directly from the air, could potentially capture 9000 tonnes/yr and would handily manage a coal power plant.
The problem is that "terraforming another planet" is stuff that young men who are impressionable read in science fiction, it isn't reality. We can't terraform another planet. We haven't even successfully run a fully-enclosed self-sustaining ecosystem capable of supporting human life on earth. We have never sent anyone to another planet, and the rocket equation highly constrains interplanetary transportation, let along radiation shielded interplanetary transportation capable of sending humans.
We will _never_ terraform Mars, I doubt a human will ever set foot there. I doubt we'll even survive as an advanced species for 200 more years.
We actually _have_ every bit of necessary technology to sustainably run something very close to modern society, and we are too stupid collectively do fix terrestrial political problems. We don't even need to terraform our own planet, we just have to stop digging up coal and pumping up oil and burning it. No wasteful and inefficient "negative emission" stupidness is necessary. This is like "clean coal". It's something that very, very wealthy people that make money from oil and coal bring up to essentially troll the populace, and distract them from the problem until we're as close to the brink as possible.
I'm sorry to be depressing, but this magical thinking about sending people to Mars and terraforming planets is counterproductive.
edit: I take it back, we can terraform a planet. The sum total of human activity for 150 years has warmed the Earth few degrees (though they are a critical few degrees)
I can understand the "We'll never terraform Mars" argument. (It's certainly a looooong ways off if we ever even start. I suspect there's not much value in it.)
But never landing a human on Mars seems like a bad bet to me. With Musk/SpaceX pushing for it, and our history of landing rovers there, it seems like putting some people on Mars, however briefly, is in our future. I'm curious why you feel this way.
The energy for the trip, the return trip, the duration, and weight requirements associated with radiation shield are why I'm skeptical. It's technically possibly, certainly. So is switching to a 100% solar fueled grid. But I hate to be to pessimistic: I'm older than average here, and I would feel unbelievably privileged to witness humans landing on Mars. I hope it happens.
Idk how old you are, but I suspect within the next 20-30 years we will be deploying robots that turn the iron, soil, etc. On Mars into a plastic, resin, metal-frameworks, fuel and water. From there robots can build some facilities or at least materials and humans can land in a pre-constructed environment.
I dont know about a return trip though, but I do think long term inhabitation is possible. Especially, with our advances in robotics, genetics, and medicine.
Also remember it takes a lot less to launch a rocket off of Mars. For instance, you only need 33 tons of propellant to get an 18 ton MAV off the ground[1]
I find that this sort of eco-doomsaying much less constructive than the impressionable young men with inflated dreams.
Regardless of how innefecient it is to feed positive change through impossible dreams, insisting on idea that humans are self-destructive species that will destroy themselves and what's around them is borderline neurotic and ignores the continuum-nature of evolution of Earth.
Humans have been terraforming the planet since life has appeared on here.
I doubt that you know the science here very well if you think this is neurotic.
AGW won't destroy life on Earth, just a bunch of it. We'll also probably relegate most human civilization to northern parts of North America and Asia. The process of that happening will, bluntly, will be warfare and genocide. The sea level increases will destroy quadrillions of dollars of current value of investment in infrastructure. We will have used up all easily accessible sources of hydrocarbon, mineral, metal, and radioactive deposits. I'm sure than 500M-1B humans will figure out a new way to get buy, but it will be very different that what you or I would be used to. I'm unabashedly cynical on this. We've known about this for over 30 years, and have seen predictions turn out correctly in real time for 20.
I believe this, which is why I've stopped keeping up with environmental news. It's so fucking depressing and sours my enjoyment of the life I have now. If things genuinely will shake out this way, I want to have enjoyed the sweet life while I had it.
It has to be depressing to persuade people that it's important by scaring them and removing all hints of possible ways out other than reducing fossil fuel use. Reality won't be as bad as the impression the news and climate change battlers give.
Eg the IPCC predicts a 1 foot sea level rise in 100 years. Watching the news, you'd think it was 6 ft. Those are both extreme values due to uncertainty.
Quadrillions in infrastructure? China moved half it's population to cities in the past few decades and built the infrastructure to support them. They're still doing fine despite that huge cost. 100 years is a long time for a building.
Cooling and warming by a few degrees can happen in much less time, possibly just a few centuries - see Younger Dryas.
Which, from what I can tell, should make us more worried, since it shows how drastic and unpredictable the climate can respond to changing conditions, like greatly increasing the carbon in the atmosphere.
It's not that we can't "terraform" our own planet. It's that the consequences of getting it wrong, in doing so deliberately, could easily be worse than those of the "accidental" ways we've been doing it for a couple centuries now...
That's the problem, it's all just theory and even for Mars we don't think it would be easy. For planets like Venus, straight impossible at our current level of tech and the constraints of such worlds.
What's wrong with industry becoming complacent once their emissions are neutralized? The goal is to keep the planet intact, not punish emitters.
It seems to me that stopping emissions will be a lot easier and cheaper than capturing them, but if it turns out that capture gets the job done, then that's great too.
One could argue that the reason things are getting as bad as they are is because no one is punishing emitters strongly enough.
Who's to say that, as soon as emissions are neutralized, some won't again try to exploit the fact that it's "less dangerous to pollute more" as a competitive advantage? At least until there's another crisis down the road.
I would completely agree with that argument. But punishing emitters is one potential means to an end, not the actual goal.
You'd obviously need to ensure that capture capacity kept up with emissions, but at least it would be really easy to come up with the correct price for a carbon tax.
It is largely one of timescale. Carbon dioxide is not only present in our atmosphere but essential for our life. We've just got more of it than the atmosphere than we need without a doubt.
So in comes this notion of capture. Capture to me means taking existing processes which produce carbon dioxide and somehow sequestered. So you've got a plant that burns natural gas to produce electrical power. If you capture the carbon dioxide and somehow incorporate it into something else that people need, they have an incentive to keep it capturing. The obvious example would be bricks. Use the bricks to build a structure, people preserve and use the structure. The carbon dioxide is captured. Obviously no one has figured out how to create room temperature bricks of carbon dioxide.
My issue with this project is they basically are shoving some carbon dioxide containing material in the ground and saying it is somehow captured. It might stay down there for a million years or just a few months. It's like the fracking industry claiming it doesn't impact the environment.
