Large-Scale CO2 Removal Facility Set For Scotland (bbc.com) 145
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A large facility capable of extracting significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air is being planned for north east Scotland. The proposed plant would remove up to one million tonnes of CO2 every year -- the same amount taken up by around 40 million trees. The extracted gas could be stored permanently deep under the seabed off the Scottish coast. This Direct Air Capture (DAC) plan is a joint project between UK firm Storegga and Canadian company Carbon Engineering. It's at a very early stage of development -- today's announcement is the beginning of the engineering and design of the plant. A feasibility study has already been carried out and if everything goes well, the facility would be operational by 2026. Storegga say up to 300 jobs would be created in the construction phase. However there are many hurdles, including planning and finance -- and a site for the plant won't be selected until next year. If it does go ahead it would be the biggest DAC facility in Europe and depending on the final configuration, could be the biggest in the world. Why Scotland? The companies cite the country's skilled workforce needed to operate a DAC facility, given their abundant renewable energy sources. The country also has pipelines going out under the sea to allow the permanent burial of the captured carbon.
Just plant trees (Score:3, Insightful)
My family has been planting 1000 new trees every spring on my Uncle's property. We've been doing this for over 10 years. The previous owner downed and sold every single tree on this property as firewood 45 years ago. It is unrecognizable today (in a good way).
Re:Just plant trees (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just plant trees (Score:5, Insightful)
Just for fun, I decided to look some numbers up.
As of the last few years, the global average is 4 tons of CO2 produced annually per capita. The US-specific number is more like 22 tons.
The “average” tree apparently weighs 2 tons (no idea how anyone got that number, but it seems reasonable enough, so I’ll go with it) and thus offsets about 7.33 tons of CO2 (it doesn’t keep the O2, after all, just the C), so an American would need to plant 3 average trees per year to offset their consumption.
That isn’t too crazy, but the problem is two-fold:
1) Even if you do it, most people won’t and that cumulative effect is massive.
2) You needed to have planted those trees 20 years ago, since they’ll be 2 tons once they’re mature. I.e. It’ll take 20 years before you can offset your CO2 production for this year.
Even though it isn’t likely to be that effective, it does help in a small way, plus trees are just nice to have around. Just look at a neighborhood with mature trees vs. one where they clear cut everything but haven’t replanted yet and you’ll get a sense for what a difference trees can make.
Grow the trees in the ocean (Score:2)
I used to wonder why the ocean is not covered in trees. The basic ingredients are there -- sunlight, water, carbon, nitrogen (in the air).
What is missing is trace elements. Trees would need to be reengineered to either not need them or conserve them very well.
With our huge advances in biotech, that may well become possible.
Re:Grow the trees in the ocean (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Grow the trees in the ocean (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just plant trees (Score:4, Informative)
The “average” tree apparently weighs 2 tons (no idea how anyone got that number, but it seems reasonable enough, so I’ll go with it) and thus offsets about 7.33 tons of CO2 (it doesn’t keep the O2, after all, just the C), so an American would need to plant 3 average trees per year to offset their consumption.
The numbers [fao.org] are something like 3 tonnes of carbon of average captured per 1 ha of temperate region forest per year. So you'd need two hectares worth of new forest per US citizen (22 tonnes of CO2 = 6 tonnes of carbon). So you'd need 6400000 square kilometers of new forests. The US landmass is around 9800000 square km, so you need to reforest 65% of US landmass.
Re:Just plant trees (Score:5, Insightful)
Where to get the power? (Re:Just plant trees) (Score:5, Insightful)
As nice as these carbon capture plants my be we will still need something to power them. Something with as close to zero CO2 emissions as possible. Something reliable. Something that we can put most anywhere and run any time. That something will be nuclear fission power.
The land area problem will come up too. Solar power will displace land needed for crops, or just carbon capture with other plants. Wind power in nations like UK, Japan, South Korea, and so on are not viable given the high population density and little land area. Here comes the idiots to talk about offshore wind. Offshore wind costs more than nuclear power. That includes the UK with Hinkley Point C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When the UK starts to run out of places for solar and onshore wind they will build more nuclear power plants. The same applies for the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Off shore wind is not a solution. Neither is solar because it competes for sunlight with crops. Oh, the idiots will say, what about all that sunny space in the desert? I bet you didn't think of that? I did think of that, and if people need food then the solar panels will come down and greenhouses will go up. What about rooftops? Rooftop solar costs more than nuclear fission power.
We are going to use nuclear power to power carbon capture and sequestration because nuclear power is cheaper than offshore wind and rooftop solar. As the parent post points out something needs to give, and when land competes for food and fiber crops with solar power we will see solar power lose that fight. We still need to eat. If population density increases then we will need greenhouses that can be packed on top of each other, with artificial light and captured CO2 pumped in. What will power those?
If carbon capture is a necessity then so is nuclear fission power.
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If the government is funding this carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and it appears that's about the only way this would get funded then even the government is going to look for the best return on their investment. If a natural gas CCGT plant emit 5 tons of CO2 and powers a CCS plant that takes 10 tons of carbon out of the air in the same time then according to LCOE estimates the CCGT plant cost 66 pounds/MWh for that 5 tons. On the other hand is nuclear power which costs 93 pounds/MWh to get a net
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It would certainly be great if the power source is carbon-neutral. But suppose it isn't, and the carbon-capture plant emits 5 metric shit-tonnes of CO2 per year. But in doing so it captures 10 metric shit-tonnes per year. It's therefore producing a net negative 5 metric shit-tonnes. That's a win!
Can you convert that to imperial units for the Americans? We don't do that metric stuff here.
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To a first approximation, one metric shit-tonne is approximately one Imperial shit-ton.
One tonne = 1000 kg = 2200 lbs. One ton = 2000 lbs. 10%. That's usually close enough for government work.
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Relevant: "The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster" https://www.wired.com/story/th... [wired.com]
Carbon capture is necessary and built into the IPCC's assumptions in a huge way
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Reforest? Much of the land area of North America hasn't had trees historically. Deserts, prairies, places like that account for a huge chunk of the land area of the USA, for instance. Now, Canada doesn't have that problem. Of course, Canada is still covered in forest....
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"Canada is still covered in forest...." ????
Ever been to central Canada ? You can drive east from Calgary for 100km without seeing a tree !
OK, that's a mild exaggeration but, not too far off. Between Drumheller (NE) and Calgary, there's so few trees, I practically know them by name. The trees there grow *very* slowly, and as a result are mostly very small, and also lack diversity (not the #WOKE kind). There's a handful that you will see see, at least 3 of those are an evergreen (pine family), the ot
Re:Just plant trees (Score:4, Interesting)
The "average" tree apparently weighs 2 tons (no idea how anyone got that number, but it seems reasonable enough, so I'll go with it) and thus offsets about 7.33 tons of CO2 (it doesn't keep the O2, after all, just the C), so an American would need to plant 3 average trees per year to offset their consumption.
The numbers [fao.org] are something like 3 tonnes of carbon of average captured per 1 ha of temperate region forest per year.
Thanks for sharing those numbers! The massive difference between your numbers and mine had me wondering where one of us went wrong, but then I saw that we're actually talking about two different things: your numbers are for ongoing sequestration per year, whereas mine were for one-time sequestration. Both are valid ways of looking at the problem, which got me thinking about which approach makes the most sense to use.
To draw what I think may be a useful analogy, suppose we wanted to start a scholarship for university students impacted by an ongoing disaster (e.g. a pandemic that lasted a lot longer than this one). One approach might be to hit up alumni and ask them each to chip in a small amount. We'd do that each year for the next few years, until the students who had been impacted by the disaster were through the system. So long as the disaster doesn't continue forever, this approach has minimal lifetime costs and is fairly easy to pull together. A different approach would be to set up an endowment. It'd take a herculean effort up front to raise enough money to create a self-funding endowment that would allow the scholarship funds to be pulled from the interest accrued, but it'd be a permanent solution that would last forever.
So which is the right approach? I'd argue that both are. If the disaster—unsustainable accumulation of greenhouse gasses—is going to last forever, an endowment—your approach—is really the only permanent solution, but it's our hope and belief that we won't be engaging in unsustainable accumulation for too many more years, so an endowment may both be overkill and out of reach. On the other hand, if the disaster is something that will go away—i.e. we get things back to a sustainable level—after a few decades, then the one-off approach likely makes more sense as a way to start things off, in that it allows us to tread water on-the-cheap while working on long-term solutions. If in a few years we get things under control, there won't be a need for an endowment or else the cost of an endowment will have come down significantly because we won't need to offset nearly as much per year.
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We don't just need to plant 3 trees per year, we would need to ensure they lived to maturity. This is tougher to accomplish. We'd probably want to plant a *lot* of trees to make sure 3 per year made it to maturity.
Of course, if we reduce our per capita carbon footprints, for example through non-fossil fuel power generation, electrification, sustainable construction, and lower carbon agricultural practices, then we wouldn't need so much carbon capture, and maybe we could create a liveable future.
Re: Just plant trees (Score:2)
At what stage during a treeâ(TM)s life does it capture the most carbon? They donâ(TM)t necessarily have to reach maturity⦠though Iâ(TM)m sure they need to be older than a few years.
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The "average" tree apparently weighs 2 tons
Perhaps. But trees are not 100% carbon. Even cellulose is only about 40% carbon, and trees also contain plenty of water and other stuff.
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The "average" tree apparently weighs 2 tons
Perhaps. But trees are not 100% carbon. Even cellulose is only about 40% carbon, and trees also contain plenty of water and other stuff.
CO2 is not 100% carbon either - less than 30% of the weight is carbon, the rest is oxygen.
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The OP already allowed for that in his calculation.
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The average tree is not a monster in a century old forest, rather a fully grown (height-wise) tree in a 40-60 years forest (or maybe a 20+ years tree in a "sustainable growth" forest).
Such a tree would have a 50+ cm thick trunk and a trunk height of 8 meters.
All the foliage and branches would maybe double that volume (if we're talking about oaks, more than double. If we're talking about fir, pine, spruce then quite a bit less).
So, assuming the trunk is a cylinder 50cm thick, its area is pi / 16 square meter
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I was getting at the idea of how hard it would be to statistically define an "average", rather than there being any difficulty in calculating the tonnage once you know what the average tree looks like. I.e. Did someone sit down and calculate how many crape myrtles there are vs. post oaks? Sago palms vs. sequoias? Birch vs. mahogany? Hickory vs. ebony? And then from all of that, determine what the average size of a tree must be?
That, to me, is the hard part.
And, if anything, my inclination would be to believ
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Your trees would have to never die or decompose. Otherwise, when they do, they release their carbon.
Carbon from burning fossil fuels comes from a different cycle than plants and animals. Undoing burning fossil fuels requires locking the carbon up forever, not putting it back into life cycle.
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Undoing burning fossil fuels requires locking the carbon up forever, not putting it back into life cycle.
Yes...but...
I addressed this topic in another comment, but the question we may need to be asking ourselves is whether we view forestation as a permanent fix or a way to tread water in the short-term.
As you and some of the other responses get at, it'd be really difficult to make it a permanent fix. It's possible, but it'd require a LOT of trees planted on a LOT of land to reach a point where enough CO2 is being sequestered in the soil to offset our current CO2 production. But if we view it as a way to tread
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Re: Just plant trees (Score:3)
Because there isn't a perfect solution is not worth trying a practical but imperfect solution?
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Because there isn't a perfect solution is not worth trying a practical but imperfect solution?
There are far better solutions than this one. And the problem with all of these climate technologies is really about scaling and cost is a secondary factor. If someone had a magic solution that could take care of getting rid of all the excess CO2, the governments of the world would gladly throw billions of USD at it. The problem is that you need to remove billions of tons of CO2 to make a difference and this specific solution here handles about 1/5000th of the problem. To make a real impact, it has to b
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Most of that carbon was in the atmosphere while humans were not around. There's a difference.
Re: Just plant trees (Score:4, Insightful)
Inaccurate. The fossil fuel inventory represents millions of years of biomass, with captured carbon from that entire period of history. Ill-thought out, poorly reasoned, and uninformed comments like this one are a plague. THINK, DUDE.
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You used the same language that climate deniers use when they talk about carbon just being fertilizer and the like. The implication is that this is harmless. 300 million years of carbon is well beyond harmless.
Re:Just plant trees (Score:4, Informative)
You'd need to plant trees forever and never burn them down. Trees are not a carbon capture and storage solution. Especially mature trees do f-all for carbon capture on account of leaving and rotting, and if that forrest catches fire, congrats you're starting at zero.
We should be planting trees.
But we also absolutely should be looking at putting the carbon we put into the atmosphere back to where we found it.
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Sure they are, but only if you cut them down. People don't like the cutting down part. An effective way to use trees for carbon capture would be to grow them to optimum size, cut them down, then bury them in mud, preferably at the bottom of the ocean. There they would eventually become coal.
It's got a lot of moving parts you would have to figure out though, and would have to be done efficiently. Pumping the CO2 directly into the ocean floor might be more
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40,000,000 Trees/Year / 1,000 Trees/Year = 40,000 year to catch up.
Sure you are doing your part to reclaim your land back to a more natural state, but the amount of CO2 we pollute is much higher than the rate of deforestation.
Also Tree's do cause their own problems (that is why we cut them down) They can spread fire, When they fall they can damage structures, their root could break into foundations and damage roads. The can block solar panels, and stop low to the ground wind (for wind turbines, but also ar
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Just plant trees
That won't remove CO2 permanently. This is problematic because the ocean is acidifying.
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Trees are not the best carbon sinks. Several studies, liking to one, show that grass is much better than trees.
https://climatechange.ucdavis.... [ucdavis.edu]
I've problems (Score:2)
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Solving the problem once and for all, I tell you.
Also "300 jobs created", fixing broken windows. In other news a massive freeway disaster left scores dead and hundreds of vehicles' worth of debris scattered across the roads. The government proudly announced their cleanup effort would create new employment opportunities for ambos, tow truck drivers and morgue operators.
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Solving the problem once and for all, I tell you.
- "Yes but where does it g..."
"ONCE AND FOR ALL!"
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I'm trying to remember a movie title. In it, a wildly popular British Prime Minister comes up with a brilliant jobs creation plan that goes something like: "Every day, 1000 British working people will throw themselves off a cliff, creating 1000 jobs!".
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This isn't Japan. Godzilla isn't a problem.
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I don't understand the compulsion to sequester carbon in forms that essentially make it disappear. If all carbon is sequestered, then all life on this planet will die. Seems like an idea that is beyond stupid. Someone has to be getting paid a ridiculous amount to do this nonsense.
Noone is suggesting to sequester all carbon. What is being attempted is to put some of the carbon that is being released from fossil fuels (carbon that was sequestered) back, the idea being that the carbon balance was fine and we should minimise the change to the balance.
How much CO2 does it produce when operating? (Score:2)
Engineers: "When operating at full power, this plant emits over one million tonnes of CO2 annually!"
Australia will be happy to provide the coal (Score:2)
To burn to produce the power...
Is your entire reply in the (Score:2)
Re:Australia will be happy to provide the coal (Score:5, Informative)
If you bothered to read the article then you'd know they're choosing to site it in Scotland because it'll be powered by the renewable energy there, just like the test plant in Squamish is run off hydro power...
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This is a great use of renewable energy. It can follow load, making use of excess cheap energy when available.
Lots of unanswered questions (Score:5, Interesting)
What form is the CO2 stored in? Compressed gas?
How much energy is used per tonne of CO2?
Does the plant stand idle if only fossil fuel energy is available?
How much CO2 can be stored before the available volume is full?
Could an earthquake cause the release of the stored CO2?
Re:Lots of unanswered questions (Score:5, Informative)
https://carbonengineering.com/ [carbonengineering.com]
Financial fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
Count on it, this is going to turn out to be a get-rich-quick swindle. Get government money, make some progress for a while, pay your C-suite grifter's extortionary salaries, then when the cost gets too high -- or anyone wants to see the books -- keep the early money and vanish.
Or it's the future (Re:Financial fraud) (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot of money in carbon capture because it is the "holy grail" of stopping global warming. People will keep trying until someone succeeds in making it financially viable, then there will be all kinds of people to copy it and improve on it.
How can capturing CO2 from the air be financially viable? Carbon neutral fuels is a big one, and why this technology has the interest of the petroleum industry. This technology can be used to produce plastics. Maybe it can be used for feeding CO2 into greenhouses to increase food production. Each one has the promise to be profitable long term, and only one needs to work to make it worth the investment.
This may be a scam, but I doubt it. There's already been a lot of money put into this company and this technology. I recall reading a story on how this caught the interest of the people in the US Navy working on a fuel synthesis technology. The Navy has their own process for CO2 extraction, and this may compete with it or complement it. The UK government put money into this. The Canadian government put money into this. The US DOD apparently put money into this. When are they going to shut everything down and pull the cord on their golden parachute?
This is a technology that is currently viable only because of government investment. A lot of technology started that way, including the internet protocol, much of our computer technology, and the shapes of the propellers on the windmills being used to power this carbon capture plant. I'll keep hearing how we need to put money into solar power because of it's promise to lower CO2 emissions, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. I think we can fund this a bit longer to see how it works out.
This is not likely a scam, if it were then they would have taken the money and ran a long time before this.
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This may be a scam,
It probably is because to do the things you mentioned requires heat of a temperature and quality that you can't get from solar or wind (or geothermal). Carbon neutral fuels are likely the path forward but that requires nuclear to be of practical value. Not only that, it requires a reactor that isn't cooled with water (which is much better actually) but good luck getting that licensed in the US. This is a political problem at this point, not a technological problem and silly test plants like the one in th
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It probably is because to do the things you mentioned requires heat of a temperature and quality that you can't get from solar or wind (or geothermal).
First, the US Navy has a prototype fuel synthesis system that is about the size of a domestic refrigerator. It's quite likely a large high temperature system can be more efficient but it's not necessary for fuel synthesis.
Second, we know how to produce high temperatures from electricity. Electricity from whatever source. Electricity that can be used to power resistance heaters. If that's not enough we can use a scaled up water torch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We use an oxygen hydrogen flame to l
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Cost per Kilo of sequested Carbon is? (Score:3)
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Probably quite a bit higher than capturing that crap when it is produced. On the other hand, if the upcoming climate catastrophe is _just_ expensive, we are getting off cheap.
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Probably quite a bit higher than capturing that crap when it is produced. On the other hand, if the upcoming climate catastrophe is _just_ expensive, we are getting off cheap.
On their website they state that the price, given large scale facilities, is 100$ per ton of CO2. If an average US citizen produces 22 tons of CO2 that is 2,200$ which seems cheap in comparison to a great deal of the other measures that are taken although the US has much larger CO2 emissions per GDP than most other developed countries, so there are also other relatively cheap savings that can be achieved.
And we can even make up for past sins using this kind of technology if we look far ahead.
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$$$ cost is irrelevant. You need to look at kWh/kg of CO2. I bet it is quite a bit higher than energy obtained from creating 1kg of CO2.
Granted they are saying they do in Scotland where they apparently have excess wind energy, but... at the end of the day doing this while UK is burning wood pellets to produce energy is just stupid. Spend the money to build power lines and send energy where it is needed.
From their website:
What energy is used to power CE’s Direct Air Capture technology?
CE’s Direct Air Capture process can use a flexible combination of renewable electricity and natural gas to power the system. When natural gas is used, the CO2 from combustion is not released, but is instead captured and delivered along with the CO2 captured from air. Our technology is also capable of reducing or completely eliminating the use of natural gas, instead relying on clean electricity as the sole energy source. This flexibility allows us to use natural gas, renewable electricity, or mixtures of both to achieve the lowest energy cost at each facility while also avoiding the creation of new emissions.
So the electricity used in operation of their plant is essentially CO2 free. If it is cheaper to run such a plant than to reduce the dependency on CO2 polluting pellets, cars or whatever it does therefore make sense to do it. But if not, then do it another way. For me it is a question of getting to carbon neutral at the lowest cost.
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If it is embarrassingly high or more than a litre of petrol,
A fraction of that cost would be far too much. It only makes sense to compare to petrol prices if you are synthesising new fuel from the CO2.
That would be nice - no long-term storage needed, it displaces fossil fuel extraction.
We do that with ethanol, but it is embarrassingly expensive.
The proposal here is cheaper in theory, (potentially) far less energy needed to extract, compress and bury CO2. But is it cheaper than reducing emissions? The question is whether the money would be better s
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If it is embarrassingly high or more than a litre of petrol,
A fraction of that cost would be far too much. It only makes sense to compare to petrol prices if you are synthesising new fuel from the CO2.
That would be nice - no long-term storage needed, it displaces fossil fuel extraction.
We do that with ethanol, but it is embarrassingly expensive.
The proposal here is cheaper in theory, (potentially) far less energy needed to extract, compress and bury CO2. But is it cheaper than reducing emissions? The question is whether the money would be better spent on nuclear, and renewables, and storage systems. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere will make a lot more sense when we've stopped adding so much.
The cost will according to their website be around 100$ per ton of CO2, so 0.1$ per kg. One liter of petrol produces around 2.3035 kg of CO2. The cost will therefore be 0.23$ per liter of petrol or around 0.87$ per gallon of petrol.
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around 100$ per ton of CO2,
That would be awesome, only $27/ton carbon. But another page says "deploy DAC technology in the UK at a cost of potentially less than £200 per tonne of CO2 in the 2020s.", -- https://www.storegga.earth/dir... [www.storegga.earth]
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First you have to calculate the cost of climate change. It's pretty difficult and often it's other people who pay for it, rather than the emitter of CO2.
In any case it's as much a pilot scheme to prove the technology as anything so being cost effective isn't all that important. Prototypes usually cost a lot more than the final product.
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Yeah, I can see corporations paying a CO2 tax without cheating or bribing their way around it...
This just has to be a government operation (non-profit) that everybody pays for and if your people are incompetent they'll pay instead of the sources of the problem. The problem are the incompetent nations who freeload off of everybody else so their own people continue to waste without any incentive to curb their contribution.
Doesn't matter, this is a required technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Reversing the global warming which has already occurred and will occur even if we went 100% carbon-free overnight, will require removing CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it. Merely stopping putting more CO2 into the atmosphere isn't enough. We need to start removing it to get us back down to CO2 levels closer to the start of industrialization. I suppose we could plant a bunch of trees and wait a few decades for them to work (centuries if the critics of biofuels are to be believed - all the arguments they make about how plants and algae are too slow to collect solar energy, also mean they're too slow to remove CO2 from the atmosphere). But that may be too little, too late. So we need to develop active carbon sequestration technologies to reverse the damage done by global warming.
The cost of that sequestration can initially be much higher than the cost of the damage or the cost of fossil fuels. Even if that's the case, it still makes sense to invest in sequestration, just like it made sense to invest in solar and wind way back when they used to cost several or dozens of times more than other energy sources. The goal is to improve the technology to drive the cost down to where it eventually becomes economically viable. Not to make it economically viable in the first iteration.
And just like we invested in solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, tidal, etc. without knowing which ones would turn out to be most cost-effective, we'll also have to invest in a variety of different sequestration technologies. Because we don't know which ones will turn out to be most cost-effective in the long term. Some of them very well may turn out to be non-viable, or even scams (like Solyndra). That doesn't defeat the argument that developing these technologies is necessary. Pretty much every argument ever made for developing renewable energy can also be made for developing active carbon sequestration.
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Renewables and nuclear power cannot reverse global warming.
No, CO2 in the atmosphere has a half-life of about 200 years. So if we just stopped extracting CO2 from the ground right now, we would return to preindustrial levels in about 2000 years (10 half-lives == 1/1024th) but would be within half of that in 200 years. Simply stopping the extraction of fossil fuels is more than enough to reverse global warming. The earth isn't a closed system.
It's garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, the pork is flowing (Score:2, Interesting)
The feasibility and planning studies will suck up lots of EU grants. I have to assume that is the real goal, for the two companies involved.
There are minor practical details of building an actual plant as well as finding and equipping suitable undersea storage (those existing pipes almost certainly won't be useful). Not to mention actually running a plant - the power requirements are huge, and that power is generated by...magic fairies? It is (no surprise) difficult to find specifics, but as near as I can
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Why would a British/Canadian project in Scotland get EU grants?
Details (Score:3)
From the TFS: " the beginning of the engineering and design of the plant."
and
"However there are many hurdles, including planning and finance..."
This isn't a proposal, it's an idea on the back of a napkin.
Clean Coal (Score:2)
This whole scheme just sounds like "clean coal" with extra steps.
The extracted gas could be stored permanently deep under the seabed off the Scottish coast.
Wasn't this whole concept already debunked when the coal industry was calling it "carbon sequestration"? But at least the coal actually produced electricity this is just going to consume energy. Sounds like tax payer money being waste on "feasibility studies" and lining the pockets of grifters as usual.
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This whole scheme just sounds like "clean coal" with extra steps.
I will take a crack at this one. Clean coal was scrubbing the CO2 and CO out of the exhaust from burning coal. It is expensive which is why none of the coal plants did it. This silly scheme is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and putting it underground so its scrubbing the exhaust from all plants, just much later in the process. The real trick is to make a synthetic fuel from CO2 in a cost-effective way. If we could do that, we could replace fossil fuel extraction and that's the real goal. Sequestrati
Love it! (Score:2)
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It's not the same as arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The correct analogy is throwing deck chairs overboard in order to prevent the Titanic from sinking.
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Its more like giving the passengers teacups and telling them to bail, because every little helps.
One million tons a year is not significant (Score:2)
The total being emitted at the moment is north of 37 billion tons a year, and rising. Mainly due to increases in the Far East. China alone is burning and mining more coal than the rest of the world put together, and is building literally thousands of coal fired power stations around the world.
Sequestering one million tons a year (at great expense) will make no difference whatever to global warming. It will be eaten up in a week or two by Chinese, Indian or Indonesian increases in emissions.
People need to
Re:But Charcoal floats! (Score:4, Funny)
No, they're saying to pump the gas CO2 under the seabed.
Anyhow, the intermediate step in the process is Calcium Carbonate.
The solution is obviously to stop making whiteboards and go back to chalk! :)
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In a distant future, aliens will visit earth. They will be amazed by the massive oceans of carbonated water and wonder how it was formed
No, they will wonder why humans didn't just use nuclear power like they did. Then they will assume that's why we aren't here anymore (which will be accurate).
It's a sponge (Score:3)
> Carbon (also known as charcoal or graphite) is very light and will eventually float to the surface.
Charcoal is a sponge. Actually it's a really, really good sponge - far more absorbent than a household sponge. It *feels* light because it's mostly air (or actually nitrogen, when fresh). Until it's underwater for a few minutes and the air gets replaced with water, of course.
diamond 3.52 g/cm3
graphite 2.25 g/cm3
amorphous carbon 1.9 g/cm3
Water 1.0 g/cm3
Carbon also combines with every other element* to m
Re:It's a sponge (Score:4, Interesting)
* I can't think of an element that won't combine with carbon, but maybe there is one.
Noble gases and noble metals won't. At least not very easily, apparently gold-carbon chemistry is a field of study, mostly for gold's ability to catalyze reactions by temporary bonds to carbon. The same goes for most any carbon bond with what is considered a noble metal. Carbon-xenon bonds are apparently a thing but not so much with lighter noble gases.
So, helium. Helium doesn't bond with carbon.
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Thanks for that. I'm not sure why the nobles didn't enter my mind until 15 minutes after I wrote that.
I got curious, so I found out that C60.3He is relatively easy to make, but it's unstable so it decomposes in a week or two.
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Re: Just buy the coal and rebury it (Score:2)
Thereâ(TM)s only so far that you can transport electricity before it becomes infeasably inefficient. Scotland has excess renewable energy, particularly during windy periods. Might as well do something useful with the extra.
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It's about a 51% loss of power on the longest possible "straight" (actually curved obviously) line route on Earth (20,037.5 km). Losing half the power is not ideal, but I would not really describe it as infeasibly inefficient for many purposes. Obviously better to use the power close to where it's generated though.
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This is a test plant. It's a science experiment to see if it's possible to do this kind of thing.
CO2 has a half life of something like 800 years in the atmosphere. If we stopped emitting it today, the atmospheric concentration would only start falling slowly, and heating would continue for a long time. So if in a hundred years we go "oh fuck, we've got to get the CO2 level down right now" we've got some idea of how to do that other than "stop burning coal and hold onto your butts for the next millennium or
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CO2 has a half life of something like 800 years in the atmosphere.
The half life of CO2 in the atmosphere is 200 years. It is 20 for methane (natural gas) BTW.
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We're both just using poor summary statistics, yours seems pretty optimistic, mine is maybe a bit pessimistic. [theguardian.com]
Anyway, might be a good idea to do some research to see if we can get rid of the stuff a little faster, no? Just on the off chance science is right after all?
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The choice is to clean up the atmosphere or to die out as a species. I see nothing stupid in trying to fix things.
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The choice is to clean up the atmosphere or to die out as a species. I see nothing stupid in trying to fix things.
There's no reason to believe that global warming is a direct threat to humans as a species. Indirectly, maybe, due to potential wars... but other than that, I don't think anyone is suggesting that the entire planet will be inhabitable.
Re: So China pollutes... (Score:2)
It doesn't have to mess up farming much to kill a few million people. And I don't just mean in third world countries. Look at where all that farmland in central USA get their water from.
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It doesn't have to mess up farming much to kill a few million people. And I don't just mean in third world countries. Look at where all that farmland in central USA get their water from.
I did not mean global warming would not have severe consequences, with many millions dead. I was merely replying to a post which claimed we had to fix it or "die out as a species". The only case related to global warming where I see the extinction of mankind happening is if the droughts and fight over resources escalate enough that we end up with nuclear war.
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"Millions"? Apparently you have not even read the best-case scenarios. Try billions dead and collapse of civilization. This is not a time-limited event like the aftermath of a global nuclear war.
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* die out as a civilization.
Although, yeah, if any of the nuclear powers were really starving there'd probably be a nuclear war. We'd likely still survive as a species. A few of us anyway.
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There's no reason to believe that global warming is a direct threat to humans as a species.
There is no reason to believe you have the slightest clue what you are talking about.
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The choice is to clean up the atmosphere or to die out as a species. I see nothing stupid in trying to fix things.
The planet has been significantly hotter than it is now and was teaming with life. Global warming is not likely to render the planet uninhabitable - particularly not for humans which are the most adaptable complex lifeform on the planet.
The problem isn't that the temperature is rising, its that its rising too fast. Many other animals without technological crutches (read: all the rest of them) simply can't adapt fast enough to cope with that, which will likely lead to many extinctions of wildlife. We on t
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Why was parent post voted down? Can anyone bring an argument against nuclear fission power and synthesized fuels in our future?