this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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I have yet to see a carbon capture that seems at all feasible. In some cases there seems to be something that might replace fuel at net 0 which is at least promising in that we are still burning fuel so it would be better to stop getting it from the ground. Problem is is that we have a society built on burning one barrel of oil to easily get 100 barrels and im not sure we are going to get 100 solar panels/wind turbines/etc from one of the particular thing.
Direct air capture is way more practical than any kind of regular carbon capture. And direct air capture is never going to be a major part of de-carbonizing, even if it will be essential for total success.
There has literally never been a commercially-successful carbon capture implementation. Well over a billion sunk into this technology with no useful results. Just total bamboozles like Petra Nova.
We have to leave fossil fuels in the ground, first and foremost. As many of them as possible, as soon as possible. We can save all this technowizard nonsense for when we're trying to get rid of the final tons. We won't need to be pissing money at "clean coal" or any such nonsense once the coal plants are all shut down. Bonus points, even the free market wants to shut them down because they're not economical.
Im not really confident on the coal part either. Its not so economical in the US but every so often you see articles in other places about doing more. And not just china and india but like australia.
Capturing carbon is really amazingly simple: plant trees.
Unfortunately planting trees doesn't get venture capitalists interested.
my understanding is that tree planting isn't considered a magical solution because all that vegetable matter ultimately dies and its sequestered carbon is released by the creatures or microbes that break it down for energy and nutrients.
You can't plant old growth forests.
A huge amount of the carbon sequestration done by trees happens well below the ground and takes hundreds or even thousands of years to get effective. If you cut down an acre of trees, you'll have to plant many acres to get the same effect in any kind of human timescale, and that just won't and likely can't happen. That acre was cleared for a reason and it's unlikely just because an identical acre without trees somewhere else was in the wrong place.
Also worth pointing out that carbon capture and carbon removal/air capture are different things. Carbon capture happens at the smokestack. I know it's confusing terminology, but that's what's being discussed in this article and that is what the term means in industry use.
Thank you. Im not who you were replying to but I was confusing the terminology.
Then we use the wood.
Wood for construction locks up the carbon for decades to centuries.
Leaves become animal fodder and from there become fertilizer.
The more we replace disposable plastic with disposable paper the fewer microplastics we add to the environment.
If wood ends up in a landfill, its carbon gets locked underground for centuries. An anoxic landfill, and it could stay down there until it turns into oil. Dump it in the ocean and it sinks down among the shipwrecks and becomes fish habitat. And the worst poison wood leaches into the environment is the stuff black walnut uses to kill other plants.
Compared to everything else we make crap out of, wood is an ecological miracle.
And if all else fails wood for heat and power is literally carbon neutral.
We have to plant trees constantly, and store the logs and leafy material deep underground
It takes 200kWh to produce a 100W panel. Within 30 years that panel produces about 26,000kWh with a capacity factor of 10%, so we are talking about a similar factor. Even crazier solar panels last longer then 30 years, but they do loose capacity over time. However that happens slowly, so a century old solar panel is possible.
The issue is that oil can be used right away, whereas renewables take decades to produce the power.
As for carbon capture plants do it no problem. Then we need to take the carbon from the plants, in processes like wood coal and store it. That works, but it takes too long. There are also industrial processes, which we know work. However none are fast and scalable enough to even make a dent in current emissions. It makes perfect sense to look into it to reduce the carbon content long term, but right now the cheapest way to reduce future carbon in the atmosphere is to use less fossil fuels.