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This is wrong, or perhaps I misundertand.
Entropy is a different concept from economic viability.
The rule of non-decreasing entropy applies to closed systems.
A carbon capture system running on solar energy on Earth (note: wind energy is converted solar energy) is not a closed system from the Earth perspective - its energy arrives from outside. It can decrease entropy on Earth. Whether it’s economically viable - totally different issue.
…and I don’t think the Sun gets any worse from us capturing some rays.
Also, I don’t think entropy has anything to do with carbon in the atmosphere. I thought it had to do with the size of the energy packets.
Its that using an extra step in the process (producing energy + CO2, then using energy to remove CO2) is going to increase entropy more than not producing CO2 in the first place.
Economic viability is separate and sometimes related to things like this.
Its irrelevant to the economy (in the short term at least) whether a process is efficient in terms of energy or resources. What is relevant is whether or not something can be done for either small sums of money, or sold for profits. More likely both in a capitalist style economy.
Note that it does happen in some cases that using less energy/resources is more profitable, but the driving force, again in a capitalist style economy, is the profit.
Yeah, it’s different. I think the machine on the left is an infinite energy machine. Those will never work.
The machine on the right is a carbon capture machine which does work. But not well enough. Are fast enough to solve any of the problems that we have.
I’m fine with playing around with a carbon capture machine and seeing if we can improve it, but I would never want to rely solely on it.
I want to try a thousand solutions to the global warming problem. Including societal and government changes. Cuz you know otherwise we all die.
I mean, we already have carbon sequestration machines that are even self replicating, and require minimal, if any maitenance…
Trees and algae.
Most pollution comes from shipping, agriculture, and other large industries. Poor countries/people cannot contribute because they are barely getting by as is. Even if the entire middle class in wealthy countries magically switched to electric/public/bicycling, started recycling, stopped watering grass, etc. it would make no noticeable difference.
The idea that social changes at individual level can help with pollution comes directly from propaganda pushed by cunts who are actually killing our planet for profit. Fuck them. Don’t spread their lies.
I don’t. When I say social change I’m more talking about like social thinking that individuals are the problem. Sorry if that was not clear.
I’ve heard there’s a practical green solution to carbon capture. The units are practically maintenance free and power themselves with solar energy. This allows to deploy them on many small patches of land. The captured carbon is stored in solid organic compounds that may be used as building materials. It may sound to sci-fi to be true, but it’s actually just trees.
Babe wake up, new copypasta just dropped !
Agree, carbon capture process is quite efficient now. I’m working on (pretty big) company doing Carbon Capture and Sequestration. The idea is to use empty oil&gaz reservoir to inject back carbon where it comes from. So there are several advantage:
- The land is already messed up by former drilling platerform. No need to shave another forest to create a facility
- No waste to handle, as the captured carbon is injected in the underground. We also study the possibility to inject other kind of waste, like domestic ones.
- Simplified process as we can keep Co2 in gaz state to inject back in former natural gaz reservoir. Not even needed to extract carbon to solodify it.
- Yes, trees are much more efficient and eco-friendly, but sometime we cannot just plant billions of trees. Whereas a CCS facility is relatively small compared to a whole forest.
That seems like a disaster waiting to (re) happen, what’s your thoughts on that?
What do you mean ?
Carbonating a void underground seems like a bad plan. God help us if Mentos get down there.
And OP was talking about trees.
I think as long as they throw a 10 lb bag of sugar down the hole before they start pumping then you don’t have to worry about it accidentally becoming a diet Coke.
Geological reservoirs are thousands metter depth and several dozen of km wide. Pressure is a few MPa, and temperature hundreds of °C. Condition are so extrem that filling them with gaz barely change anything. Especially if they were already filled with gaz dozen years ago. Furthemore, they are not big vacum like most people imagine. It’s more like giant spongy rock, like sand. It’s not a baloon you inflate or deflate.
CCS facilities are not in competition with forest. It’s a complementatry solution. If you manage to capture carbon next to poluting factories, you don’t spread Co2 on the atmosphere, waiting it to be captured by a forest the other side of the globe. And they can be powered by solar panels.
gaz
Why?
Keyboard wear levelinq
How much carbon gets released building this technomarvel?
How long before it hits carbon neutral, if even carbon negative?
Now imagine if instead of playing technowizard… your company spent that money on planting trees?
Global Co2 production of human activities is about 35Gt per year (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions). Forests absorb around 7.5Gt per year (https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbon-they-emit-each-year). Let say we double the total amount of forest in the whole planet, and we cut Co2 production by half. We are very roughly 15Gt produce VS 15Gt absorb. Is the problem solved ? Nope.
First, because these forests has to stay in place, or used as building material but cannot be burn to for heating. So we still have to plant extra forest for heating. Second, we still have all the Co2 we have put in atmosphere since a century. So the goal is not to be equilibrium, but to be net negative.
Worldwide CCS capacity has been estimated between 8,000 and 55,000 gigatonnes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage). And, yes, it is already carbon negative, and already in production in several countries with currently a net result of ~50Mt Co2 per year (https://www.statista.com/statistics/726634/large-scale-carbon-capture-and-storage-projects-worldwide-capacity/)
There is not a unique solution “Plant Trees and go electric” to global warming. There are lots of solutions, with pros and cons. CCS is just a small part of the equation. Use renewable energy, use storage (litthium batteries, Hydrogen, …), Nuclear, change habit to consume less, plant trees and develop carbon capture solution.
The problem won’t be solved with a unique solution, but by finding the good balance between all the possibilities. And those who know it won’t work are please to let those who doesn’t know try.
How are CCS carbon positive, when it requires more electricity to sequester, than it would to just not produce the carbon output, to begin with?
You doesn’t seems to be the kind of person with whom can have constructive argument. I gave you facts and number. Sorry I cannot take my time machine and go back 200 years back telling Great Britain to stop burning coal.
Also, my company has as objective to becomes neutral by 2030 and 20% carbon negative by 2050. Locally, we have decreased our electricity consumption by 20% since 2022 and put in place mobility actions to push people taking bike or bus. Nearly half of employees use soft transport (public, bikes, onewheel, etc…)
We cannot rewrite the past or snap finger to change habits of 8billions peoples.
We will be juge on our current actions and futur results. As of today, we are trying something which we hope is going to the right direction. But its always easier to criticize and not doing anything.
I gave you facts and number.
The facts are it takes 1.5x powerplants to scrub the carbon from 1x powerplants, using CCS.
So, it’s just better to NOT use dirty electricity, and convert it to a renewable, like solar, wind, or hydro.
Also, my company has as objective to becomes neutral by 2030 and 20% carbon negative by 2050.
So, your company will be paying the full cost of the carbon produced by your company? Doubtful. Nobody pays full environment price at the pumps. Or, their electric bills. Or their nat gas bill.
Fossil fuels are subsidized.
Density of CO2 produced vs what trees capture is massively unequal. Yes trees can, but not on any tangible scale that would ever keep up with what we are doing to the planet.
Yeah, agreed. Carbon capture won’t save us, not trees nor otherwise. We have to slow down what we are doing to the planet.
Yes, the most that carbon capture can do is temporarily slow down climate change. It turns out the only way you can stop getting carbon from outside the carbon cycle into the carbon cycle is to stop taking carbon from outside the carbon cycle and putting it into the carbon cycle.
But the problem with oil is that it’s really good, and it does a lot of stuff really well
But the problem with oil is that it’s really good
Oil is good because it’s cheap and it’s only cheap because we don’t pay the full bill. If we’d bill polluters for the full cost it would take to offset the emissions, it would quickly stop being economically viable to use oil in many sectors.
Not to mention the area needed, for the amount of trees needed. Trees also decompose, so the storage function is different, but people are quick to assume.
Decomp still sequesters most of the carbon into the soil, which next gen plants uptake some.
Not to mention, a single sq km of algae sequesters tons annually.
And not even mentioning the add on sequesters: New trees bring whole ecosystems, and promote savannah and meadow formation, which also sequesters carbon.
And don’t forget the biodiversity. Ecosystems and fauna depend on each other.
Ok, but how about we do more than trees? Why are you on the internet when pre-linguistic grunting works just fine?
If you can find a more efficient, less expensive way to physically sequester carbon from the atmosphere than letting forests grow, I’m sure there’s a lot of awards you could win
Why does it have to be cheaper? Why not both?
Because if it isn’t cheaper than simply growing trees, the money would be better spent simply growing trees
And places trees don’t grow?
Try thinking for a second.
Places where trees don’t grow are probably not the best places for carbon sequestration if you can’t sequester carbon there cheaper or easier than sequestering carbon in trees elsewhere
You could cause a massive death event in the West/developed nations plus China and India which would slow things a lot though I’d argue killing billions isn’t the ideal solution.
The point of my comment is that if trees wouldn’t exist, they would seem like some futuristic sci-fi solution too good to be true. Just because something is shiny new tech, it isn’t automatically better. Sure, just planting trees won’t save us if we release all the carbon that is already captured in the form of fossil fuels, but how about we stop releasing all the carbon that is already captured in the form of fossil fuels?
Water is the biggest limiting factor, trees need more water.
the picture on the right isn’t demonstrating an engine. They simply use renewable energy to power the fans that suck in the air.
Doesn’t change the fact that industrial carbon capture is a scam, and most of that captured CO2 is later released back into the environment to help extract oil from old wells.
https://www.aogr.com/magazine/sneak-peek-preview/carbon-capture-boosting-oil-recovery
Just checked the numbers, for those interested.
A gas power plant produces around. 200-300kWh per tonne of CO2.
Capture costs 300-900kWh per tonne captured.
So this is basically non viable using fossil fuel as the power. If you aren’t, then storage of that power is likely a lot better.
It’s also worth noting that it is still CO2 gas. Long term containment of a gas is far harder than a liquid or solid.
Who says you power that thing with fossil fuels? The real way to do that is via giant nuclear reactors or reactor complexes.
Fission power can be made cheaper per MW by just making the reactors bigger. Economies of scale, the square cube law and all that. The problem with doing this in the commercial power sector is that line losses kill you on distribution. There just aren’t enough customers within a reasonable distance to make monster 10 GW or 100 GW reactors viable, regardless of how cheap they might make energy.
But DACC is one of the few applications this might not be a problem for. Just build your monster reactors right next door to your monster DACC plants.
But then the power generated by those reactors is better used to power things that burn fossil fuel in a less efficient way or to simply replace the fossil fuel powered electricity generators…
Quebec transports its electricity over more than a thousand kilometers, surely distance from nuclear reactors isn’t an issue if you build the infrastructure around it.
Only when the last carbon based power plant is close, we can see if there’s energy left to waste on that capture carbon machine.
I’m sure the AI datacenters would have a few GW to spare if we put the LLMs on pause.
There are 3 use cases I’ve seen.
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Making fossil fuel power stations “clean”.
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CO2 recovery for long term storage.
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CO2 for industrial use.
It’s no good for the first, due to energy consumption. This is the main use I’ve seen it talked up for, as something that can be retrofitted to power plants.
It’s poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn’t do.
The last has limited requirements. We only need so much CO2.
The only large scale use case I can see for this is as part of a carbon capture system. Capture and then react to solidify the carbon. However, plants are already extremely good at this, and can do it directly from atmospheric air, using sunlight.
It’s poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn’t do.
Why wouldn’t the device include or feed a compressor to liquidize the CO2? It takes just a little over 5 atm of pressure which is trivial.
You also need to sustain 5 atm, with no leaks for years. Where is it being stored, and who’s paying for the maintenance? All it would take would be a bit of civil unrest, or corruption, and the work could be undone in mass.
The only DAC variant i could see working out is if it takes the CO2 from high-concentrated sources (such as portland cement factories) and transforms it into something practical, like liquid fuel or methane.
It could be leading to cheaper methane than from biological sources, because technological processes can have higher efficiency, and therefore lower prices.
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Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear now. The main problem is it’s not sunny and/or windy every day. A carbon capture system doesn’t need to be running 24/7 though.
If we build way more wind/solar than we use then the excess can dumped into things like this.
Sorry but the economics of nuclear just doesn’t work for everything.
One of the interesting energy capture ideas I’ve seen with Solar and wind is based on kinetic potential energy in high-rise buildings. So you build a sort of heavy weight elevator that is elevated during windy and sunny hours and then it slowly gets released and gravity driven friction generating energy.
This coupled with solar windows and it’s a pretty neat idea (not sure how viable though)
Edit: examples: https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-elevators-skyscrapers
This might work on the scale of a building to even out its own power usage throughout a day, but to make a difference on a city grid scale, you need an insane amount of height and/or weight.
Check out Pumped Water Energy Storage. It’s the same concept but uses water as the weight. Doing the math on the Ludington Pumped Storage Power Plant’s active capacity, it stores over 100 billion pounds of water.
Good luck building enough capacity in nuclear power to do that. Nuclear plants tend to be a lot more expensive and take a lot longer to build than anticipated.
Literally only in the US and Europe. Remove the profit motive and don’t keep on inefficient construction companies and it’s a quick process.
There’s no profit motive for large scale carbon capture anyway, so big CC plants and big nuclear plants would need the same political will.
Can you point out a nuclear project that was a quick process? How would removing the profit motive make it quicker?
Sure, China. You can build a nuclear power plant from dirt to operation in 6 months. Not 10 years plus infinite overages, 6 months.
If there’s not a perverse profit motive at every stage and instead people are rewarded for getting the job done and getting the job done right, you end up with high quality fast engineering.
Yes, it works as a “plan B” (along with many other things).
Don’t loose hope. We can still win. Keep pushing for producing less CO2.
It’s also way easier to just stop digging up coal instead of inefficiently trying to get the exhaust from burning it partially back underground.
You would presumably capture the carbon using excess solar and wind power, which is also the cheapest power there is, sometimes going negative
Is your capture number including the cost of liquifying the CO2 for storage?
We already have solar powered carbon sequestration systems, that require almost no maintenance over a period of a couple of hundred of years of operational life…
Trees.
Until they burn or rot and release the carbon back into the air
Also trees only grow where trees grew in the past, so growing new forests will only capture the carbon that was released when the old forest there was burnt or cut
Decomp still sequesters carbon.
Sure, burning them releases a portion back, but not most of it…
What do you think comprises ash?
If you want to capture the most of the carbon, you cook the wood in an oxygen free environment turning it to charcoal and liberating volatile components (which could be used as carbon neutral fuel to run the furnaces)
Nothing can eat charcoal, so it could be stored cheaply
If you want to capture the CO2 from fossil fuel, it feels like it’d be easier to filter it out before dumping it in the atmosphere in the first place (apart from the obvious option of just not using fossil fuel)
It would, but it takes more energy that gets produced total. You’re spending 300wKh to make 220kWh of electricity.
Is that using numbers for carbon capture from the atmosphere? Carbon capture directly on the exhaust of a fossil fuel power plant would probably be an order of magnitude more efficient. Obviously you can’t sustain everything by only using fuel combustion, but you could probably reduce to total emissions per kWh quite a bit without even looking at renewables.
So power it with solar/wind?
You could just replace the power plant with solar/wind and it would be cheaper
What power plant? We’re talking about powering a carbon capture plant. If you do that with close to zero emission power, what’s the downside?
Worst case is that they realize that the carbon capture plant is inefficient and you still have wind power.
Right but the carbon capture uses more power to capture the co2 than the power plant uses to produce it. So if you replaced said power plant with renewable energy instead of using three times as much to capture the carbon from the original plant, it would net the same result.
Co2 is liquified before storage.
And how do you plan to keep it liquefied, on a large scale, for 100s of years? It’s currently done using pressure vessels amd chillers, that require maintenance etc.
The problem isn’t a missing technology. it’s our political and economic system.
I’m all for advancing tech but nothing is going to work until we fix our behavior. We use fossil fuels because they’re profitable and allow or growth-at-all-cost economy. There’s nothing for which they’re the only option. Only a few things for which they’re the best option; the power grid and transit aren’t on that list.
That small red bulb counteracts the entropy argument because you bring energy (and quite a lot of I recall) into the system.
Would be a sad day if we no longer could reduce entropy locally under the invest of energy.
Would be a sad day if we no longer could reduce entropy locally under the invest of energy.
I don’t think there’d be anyone left alive to be sad in that case…
That’s sad
The wider issue is you have to generate that energy, and you have to be able to capture more carbon than that generation released.
As I understand it doesn’t at all. This is why it’s seen as analagous to a perpetual motion machine, it’s an endless chain of power plants capturing each others carbon to no end.
You could use solar of course, but then why generate anything with fossil fuels just to capture the carbon with solar? Just use solar.
Because we still need to bring CO2 levels down even if we stop burning fossil fuel.
And then we’ll probably need to burn fossil fuel to keep them at the right level, since we are in a capitalistic society and we’re never going to be able to shutdown the CO2 collectors if they are ever built.
What I mean by entropy is that we burn fossil fuels (low entropy) and release CO2 into the atmosphere (high entropy), so it takes a lot more energy and effort to remove CO2 than simply not burning fossil fuels.
Clearly laws of physics work against us when we try to remove a relatively low concentration gas from a planet-wide system.
Next time you write a scientific publication, /s, make sure to have it reviewed by at least 2 Nobel Prize ! 😋
(thanks for the explanation … it was not clear at all)
There are plenty of arguments to be made against direct air capture, but entropy isn’t one of them. Nobody ever claimed this is some kind of perpetuum mobile.
This is a joke.
While physically possible DAC is a waste of money and energy compared to effective measures such as constructing solar farms, batteries and power lines. Even hydrolysis may look attractive.
At the latest after decarbonization of the power grid (yes I am laughing as I write this), we will want to remove CO2 from the air which was emitted 50 years ago. Also I would like to point out that the IPCC scenarios about reducing global warming already include carbon capture. Plans to remove CO2 from energy production till 2035 already only work under the premise that we actively start removing CO2 from the atmosphere simultaneously.
That’s right. We should only do one thing, and that’s to switch away from fossil fuels. It won’t be a problem that we will still have all that CO2 warming the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans, we really shouldn’t bother trying to make that tech any better, it has clearly no use.
You fucking armchair Reddit-ass commenter.
My man, the issue is that reluctance to decarbonize may be fuelled by this. Not that it will not be necessary. The current climate predictions are quite optimistic and shit is going to shit. This means we must not hope for a wonder weapon, but do what is possible and economic today, instead of active inaction and paralysis.
This sentiment is shared with a substantial part of the CCS critical experts.
Even if we went to zero emissions soon, we’d still want to decrease CO2 over time to reverse the effects of climate change. Capturing co2 is always going to be much more energy intensive than not emitting it in the first place, but sometimes you don’t have another choice.
Or you know, we could plant trees…the original carbon capture device.
Yeah, but then you need to cut them down and burry them so that decomposition doesn’t release the co2 again. And it takes a lot of land, which can be prohibitive on the scale we’ll need.
Another interesting option is fertilizing parts of the ocean for algie to grow. Cody’sLab has an interesting video on a possible way to do that with intentionally crashing astroids into the ocean. https://youtu.be/z7u_IqzkJzE https://youtu.be/2zQb_OitsaY/?t=13m40s
All of these, plus mechanical direct air carbon capture are methods of carbon capture. The right answer will likely be some mix of all of them.
that’s why I just throw all my used paper in the trash to be buried in landfills #doingmypart #onlykindajoking
You may be able to get away with stacking the cut trees in deserts, where the dryness may prevent bacterial action
Edit: I watched the Cody’s lab video. I’m now on team asteroid 2024 yr4. If it isn’t going to hit we ought to try to get it to hit the Southern Ocean, and if it will hit we should aim it
yeah, i guess the algae would also have a counter-effect to global warming.
however, one must be a bit more sensitive about it, as it’s a biological process and can mess with the biological world around it. consider: somewhen in the 1970s, a huge cargo ship full of fertilizer (ammonia) sank in the ocean and it lead to a huge algae-growth in the middle of the ocean.
it definitely took some CO2 out of the air, but these algae often also produce lots of toxins as a by-product (to keep predators away), so that lead to a massive fish-dying. which is not so wishable, either.
so anyway, i guess taking CO2 out of the air can happen, but it should happen slowly, such as to not strain the environment too much.
yup, turns out burning coal is us literally releasing carbon that was already captured and stored ages ago.
Aren’t there better plants? I remember reading that some forms of algae are way more efficient or something like that.
The company that was trying to use bacteria to make fuel from water and the CO2 from the air shut down a few years ago
see my comment above … yes, algae can take out lots of CO2 from the atmosphere,
in fact i remember reading that 50% of the global photosynthesis actually happens in the oceans.
also, the algae have the advantage that they might automatically sink to the bottom of the ocean, thus taking the carbon out of the atmosphere permanently. but i’m not sure about that, in fact. also, something similar could be achieved with wetlands, such as marsh and swamp, which bind organic material underwater. that water is oxygen-depleted, so it conserves the organic material permanently. this is how peat is created.
Yes but no. The two actual uses of carbon capture is to remove the co2 from the air before it would happen naturally and the other is making fuel sustainable for retro or novelty vehicles. You dont have to stop selling gas cars if all the fuel they use is made with carbon capture. This makes the fuel more expensive but more sustainable. Once you have driven a 911 or skyline you will understand why someone would want to drive a gas car ;) Also, technically you are going from a higher energy fuel to lower energy so as long as you can do something with the co2 it abides by thermodynamics but the problems arise when you consider real world losses.
TLDR: carbon capture is a technology we should use after we stopped polluting to fix the earth.
TLDR: carbon capture is a technology we should use after we stopped polluting to fix the earth.
Yeah, it would just give people a blank check to use more fossil fuels. It is kinda like a diabetic person who acquired the disease later in life, and still not adjusting their lifestyle because drugs mitigate the effects anyhow. And the person will keep eating unhealthy food or not exercising.
Pointless. The gas should be used for things that actually need it like airlines.
Trains go choo choo. But yeah that as well. On long haul flights that cant be avoided that is an excellent use for carbon capture fuel.
Specifically it’s not trying to be an over unity machine. Energy is spent pushing air through the filter medium; energy is spent moving the filter to the CO2 extractor; energy is spent heating the filter (or whatever the extraction system is); energy is spent compressing or freezing CO2 for storage
The point is to use a low carbon power source to power it.
Yes that’s the point but why take the extra steps. Use the low carbon energy directly and stop using the high carbon sources.
The argument is that there exist some use cases where we do not have a viable low carbon energy source yet (things like heavy farming equipment or aircraft), and one can effectively counteract the emissions of these things until we do develop one. Or alternatively, by the time that we eliminate all the high carbon energy, the heating effect already present may be well beyond what we desire the climate to be like, and returning it to a prior state would require not just not emitting carbon, but removing some of what is already there.
It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.
viable low carbon energy source yet
Not limited to energy sources either: steel production requires carbon as part of the alloy.
In the production of cement, calciumcarbonate gets heated and emits co2.
Both of these products can not be made without the emission of co2, even when using 100% solar and wind energy
I just literally can’t imagine a machine that is both cheaper and easier to deploy than the green goo we call life. Plant a tree. It’ll even spread itself. They look pretty.
Unfortunately, this is one area human imagination and intuition fail. Trees are great, but the math shows they simply aren’t remotely viable as a means of bulk carbon sequestration.
I think you have to cut them down and bury them (or at least don’t burn them) for the carbon to “go away”.
That’s how it got underground to begin with.
Still until we actually 100% switch everything we could power off solar and wind to solar and wind, active carbon capture doesn’t make sense, sense we could use that clean energy for direct purposes instead of cleanup. I’m not sure we will ever have “excess energy” like that, we will always rather use it for something other than cleaning up our mess, like AI.
yes, you are correct, it makes more sense to focus on electrifying our big consumers first.
however, cleaning up could happen eventually. maybe some politician in the future will sell it as some “jobs program” or sth.
What about sea weed? And sink it to the ocean floor?
They were for several hundred million years. What changed?
The evolution of micro organisms capable of eating dead trees and emitting CO2 as a metabolic byproduct.
don’t forget the role that the Great Oxidation Event played in this.
Basically, earth’s atmosphere was devoid of oxygen from its beginning, and it took billions of years to change that. it wasn’t until life had learned about photosynthesis before large amounts of oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere.
however, oxygen is a necessary prerequisite for most animal/fungus consumers, as they use oxygen to break down the organic materials. that is probably when major fossil fuel production stopped.
Nothing. You’re just asking trees to do something they’re not meant to do. Absorbing a single year of carbon emissions would require half the planet’s land area of trees. And that’s just while the trees are growing and absorbing a lot of carbon. Trees just aren’t efficient enough on a per acre basis to make a dent in carbon emissions, let alone capturing the carbon already in the atmosphere.
Trees never evolved for the purposes of mass capturing carbon from the air as efficiently as possible. Yes, they convert CO2 to O2 as part of their life cycle, but algae and other organisms have a much bigger role in capturing CO2 and turning it into O2.
Furthermore, so much of the CO2 that we emit is CO2 that was sequestered in the past over those very same 100s of millions of years. Meaning that going the natural route will take that amount of time.
Trees aren’t actually that great. Algee is what is really effective. Codyslab has some great videos and some wild ideas on application for it.
I was under the impression that’s just because of the relative surface area of the ocean vs arable land
not only that. algae are effectively plants without all the structural (wood) parts. that means, they consume less energy constructing bulky dead material, and put all of their energy towards the growth of the functional parts. that is why they can spread more rapidly and achieve a higher efficiency than plants.
I think the ideal argument is both. Have a grid that’s (at least vast majority) green, and work towards using said green energy to recapture some CO2
I think the intention is that the switch is not going to be immediate, and so there will be a stretch of time where some places use renewable sources of energy and some places still use non-renewables. There’s nothing you can do if your neighbor doesn’t switch, other than to try to capture their carbon output
Ukraine is bombing a lot of their neighbour’s fossil fuel infrastructure.
This guy gets it
Renewable energy has many parts. I have listed the 5 most important here.
As you can see, renewable biomass and hydropower are also part of renewable energy. That is because they have the advantage of being both power-sources and energy-storages. That means people will continue to use biomass and combust it in the long term.
Carbon capture is problematic. If I remember the area required to reduce C02 would be the size of Georgia and the air intake would be pulling in hurricane force winds. The numbers could be off but it would be a massive project that would require to be built by probably CO2 dumping infrastructure like factories.
Personally I’d say it would be better to colonize the Pacific Ocean so algae goes in deep ocean to be a carbon sink
I’ve heard that’s why the carbon capture is best done directly out of the machinery that creates the carbon dioxide.
Just wait until they figure out how much carbon is captured by planting a tree.
Until the tree dies and rots or burns
Specifically replanting all the forests we cut down during the age of sail is just capturing the carbon that was released when those sailing ships rotted
If we wanted to keep the carbon captured which we captured with plants, we would have to store those plants where they are safe from rot or burn them in a (not yet invented) carbon capturing furnace
It’s not just ships. Before and after ships forests were/are cleared for farming. Net carbon sequestration of almost any forest is likely to be better than cropland and pasture - more so the old forests with well developed fungi and worms and stuff that fix and recycle some of it, not so much the timber forestry but i sustect theyre better than farms still.
Steel ships did not really even slow deforestation much - globally. Though you could argue that the sail ships enabled Europeans to bring all their various shit to the Americas - so it is maybe linked to the farming thing.
https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests . FYI This graph is a bit misleading because time is warped on the vertical.
We also drained and dried out wetlands and bogs which are quite good at trapping a high amount of rotting material, also to make farmland. I’m not sure if that is counted in those stats - that is possibly more of a European overpopulation thing than a global one anyway.
I dont see how it will stop unles people start eating less, or more efficiently (I guess swap a lot of cow for cereals).
I don’t think monocultures + fertilizer + pesticides is going to be all that sustainable at keeping high yields in the long run - but we shall see about that I guess. Gene techlogy does seem to create some advances.
Decomp still sequesters carbon… where do you think all the oil came from, to begin with?
Oil came from plants before there were bacteria that can digest wood
Lol, ok.
You need to read up a bit more… that is not how we got oil…
Right. So all we need to do is deposit the wood in anoxic water and bury it.
What is this tree technology you speak of
What is the name of the contraption on the left? Looks like a perperpetual motion machine but I’d like to learn more about it.
It’s sometimes called an overbalanced wheel, an early perpetual motion device. The idea is that there’s more weights on the right side than the left side, so the wheel will turn clockwise. The weights are on rods that fall to the right as the wheel turns, so there’s always going to be more weights on the right. So the wheel turns forever. Free power woohoo!
The reality is that the balls on the left are further away from the axle. Futher from the axle = greater torque. Surprise surprise it all cancels out and the wheel eventually comes to rest.
Where are we putting all this CO2?
Old oil wells, preferably in high limestone areas
To The One Place That Hasn’t Been Corrupted By Capitalism… SPACE…
Synthetic fuels for air planes and rockets
That would put it right back into the atmosphere, though it would reduce the amount of fossil fuels used
Perhaps do this once levels are back to pre industrial and the excess is in oil wells
Perhaps we should convert all the excess to fuel and pump it into oil wells so any successor civilisations can fuck up their climate like we have
Pumping it back into wells as oil is maybe a good idea. If civilization completely collapses back to the Stone Age humanity might never rebuild and advance into an industrial era if there are no more easily accessible fossil fuels. The rapid advancements of humanity of the last two centuries is because of fossil fuels. Of course there is a chance future humans after the apocalypse can advance without fossil fuels. But we don’t know for sure. To give them a fighting chance we have to replenish whatever we took out of the ground. Otherwise they might never advance past a medieval era.
Another idea is to bury tree logs into old mines where it can’t rot so it will fossilize into coal over centuries.
Your beer/soda glass.
Once we get this tech shrunk down to the size of Nitrogen generators it’s going to revolutionize the industry.
I very much prefer CO2 in my drinks, some other carbon captures get you CO and I’ve heard that’s not as good as a drink carbonator
