This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Everyone here is mad that we’re doing this as if this is the only thing we’re doing. This… nor any of the other things suggested here… are either/or strategies. They’re all AND strategies.
People just wanna bitch.
Celebrate everything that is done to help slow down climate change and encourage more.
The problem is, that this technology is already being used to greenwash fossil fuels. There's a gas power plant currently running that got subsidies and good press for building a CCS facility next to the power plant. Something like 1% of the emissions were actually sequestered, but millions were wasted.
If these subsidies are actually tied to reasonable requirements, I'm all in. History shows, though, that this is usually not the case.
Part of the problem with new technologies is that they’re inherently less efficient than the same technologies once they’ve been further developed. And the problem with that is that it takes millions of dollars develop and deploy new technologies.
This was once the biggest argument against solar and wind. It was expensive and markedly less efficient than coal. However, solar and wind are now pretty good and continuing to get better. All because people were willing to invest the many millions of dollars to develop those technologies.
This is almost always the argument with new technologies. But to make the argument that it’s a good reason to stop investing in a wide variety of technologies that could literally help save the world is shortsighted.
You completely missed my point.
This technology is currently used to greenwash fossil fuels. With tax payer money.
That is, you pay taxes, that are paid to big oil and gas firms to pollute the planet even further. The CCS is just window dressing. It does nothing. And that's what I'm afraid will happen again.
CCS only makes sense, if the CO2 is actually pulled out of the carbon cycle. Otherwise it's fraud.
Yes, I did completely miss your point. However, I think these are two different issues. One is that oil companies are benefiting from our tax system and using carbon capture for good PR. The other is that we are trying a variety of things to help reduce the effects of climate change and one of those things is carbon capture. Oil companies using using carbon capture to gain good favor doesn’t preclude it from being a potentially helpful process.
But it's not helping, that's my point!
Fossil companies emit more CO2 because of this technology. That's not helpful.
It's a regulatory problem, but let's be honest, regulations are hardly written against major companies.
The other thing many people miss is that the article is ONLY about these specific DoE DAC hubs but other private ones already exist. ExxonMobile is running one in Wyoming.
Tallgrass Energy is building another one in Wyoming.
Those are just the private ones I'm aware of in my own state, which has a climate commitment of being carbon negative by 2050.
Behold! The Tree.
Algae isn't it ?
Efficacy of photosynthesis in mitigation of CO2 is slowing.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-global-photosynthesis-due-carbon-dioxide.amp
Until the tree dies and all that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
Trees are not the solution. The forest is the solution.
It's a technological antisolution.
Just noticed your username--did you write that post? If so, nice work
People should keep in mind that even if we stop adding more carbon into the atmosphere today it still wouldn't stop climate change because all the carbon we've put there already isn't going anywhere. To truly stop and reverse climate change requires carbon capture in one way or another. It's something we have to do.
We're sooooo far from even thinking about reversing climate change that this argument, though valid, sounds very misplaced. If can't even get my friends, who are otherwise smart and decent people, to consider not eating meat.
Try slow changes for them first. Impossible burgers are actually very tasty! And if seasoned well, taste pretty close to the real thing. Maybe convince them to do a day off meat per month at first, with these burgers to replace it.
... Which is more reason to invest in carbon capture.
If only there was some kind of creature doing it that also provides oxigen in some way....
Unpossible
Carbon capture is a fucking scam, always has been.
This just funnels more money into big oil.
Direct carbon capture is a scam. Alternatives like biochar, enhanced basalt weathering, and reforesting are definitely not.
The article says it's direct air capture. So everything I said about this being a scam is true.
I recall the biggest direct air capture facility ever made in like, Norway?, only being able to capture about a few seconds worth of our yearly carbon output lol
Why don't we just simply throw every big oil exec into life in prison. That'd solve so many issues. Fuck em, they're straight evil.
This is honestly probably more of a transition jobs program for oil workers and something designed to get a few extra votes in Congress. One of the projects is in my state (Louisiana) and the politicians all stressed how it’s creating jobs in the oil producing Southwest part of the state. And the other project is in East Texas. The companies even pinky swore that at least 10% of their workforce would be former oil workers.
I'm fine with that. If it gets jobs, gets more political support, and gets carbon out of the air... I'm all for it.
From an industry standpoint everything the article says at the end as a critique is correct. We should be playing moneyball, those fans that draw in the particles would be an additional toll on the power grid.
Instead spend the money on removing the emission sources and modernizing our grid/reducing fuel emissions. After weve exhausted low hanging fruit there we'll have to throw money at offset tech.
I suppose we'll have to get the tech made eventually but there's just so much to be reworked on our grids as is.
We're past the reducing emissions stage.
We need to BOTH cut emissions, and find a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to get to a healthy planet. Not all the CO2 traps are going to be the right way to do it, but we need to research and figure out how to sustainably pull CO2 out, stop methane emissions, switch to a carbon free grid, and.... everything else.
We are not beyond the emissions reduction stage and will not be until the grid is 100% renewable or other emissions free energy powered.
Switching to clean energy is emissions reduction. Imo should be our #1 priority because we're not reducing power demand without massive societal change.
Wasn't carbon removal an unproven concept? I feel like I watched Climate Town discuss it in one episode, talking about it never actually hitting any meaningful % thresholds...
Just Google CO2 Removal Unproven and scroll past the fossil fuel sponsored articles on top to see multiple reputable sources treating it as basically a tech scam.
Of course it's a scam, we have millions of polluting sources a few CO2 removal sites could never counter act that. Sure it helps but it is a band aid on a gunshot wound.
I'm on my phone so it's tricky too properly cite these sources but some back of the napkin math:
Global annual CO2 production is about 37 billion metric tons. About 27% of that by weight is just carbon. That's like 10 billion metric tons in just the carbon part of what is being put into the atmosphere each year by people.
The global annual production of cement, one of the most used construction materials in human history, is estimated to be about 4 billion metric tons.
If you had a magic machine that could pull carbon out of the air, remove the oxygen from it, store it in a pure form, you would have to now find some place to store two and a half times the mass of all the cement the world produces each year.
That would be just a break even on carbon. The energy costs for any kind of real life machine or infrastructure to do that would necessarily be extraordinary.
If this device was powered by magically consuming thermal energy from the area around it, the heat demands would change the climate faster than the carbon being pulled out of the air.
My point is, we make just produce too much carbon. Way way way too much.
They rather should've planted a bunch of trees
I agree that planting trees is generally good, but doing so can't sequester the amount of carbon released by humans since the start of the industrial revolution. We need other avenues to do that. If we returned forests back to how they were 100,000 years ago (untouched by modern humans) the new trees that would grow wouldn't be able to soak up the CO2 released. Returning the forests to that state with the current world population isn't feasible either as we need some of that land for agriculture.
I get your sentiment, but we're beyond a 'plant trees' solution.
We've been doing that too. The US has more trees now then it did a hundred years ago.
Amen, only angle I can see someone disagreeing with is trees becoming a potential bank of carbon to be fed back into the atmosphere via fuel for wildfires.
I so wish there were better ways to control forest fires.
Forest fires do contribute to CO2 emissions, but naturally occurring forest fires are part of the carbon sequestration cycle. The ash, and charcoal leftover from forest fires trap carbon and provide for nutrients for the next forest.
It's not great to have half a continent burn at once, but regular, controlled fires are a net sink for carbon.
Awesome. But we need more effort to clean up our oceans and reduce the waste and plastic pumped into them by mega corporations.
That is a completely different problem
The ocean also absorbs CO2 and produces half of our oxygen. Pollution is fucking that up.
We don't save the ocean, we don't get to breathe.
I can't get the article to open. Is this going to worthwhile carbon capturing or is it going to be like that South American sequestration plant which just opened that will take 168,000 years to remove just the carbon we generated in 2022?
