Construction Begins On 'Mammoth' Direct Air Capture Plant (theverge.com) 115
Swiss climate tech company Climeworks announced yesterday that it has broken ground on its biggest facility yet for capturing carbon dioxide from the air. The Verge reports: The new Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant, named Mammoth, will significantly scale up the company's operations in Hellisheioi, Iceland. That's where Climeworks built Orca, which was the largest DAC plant in the world when it came online last September. Orca can capture up to 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to how much climate pollution 790 gas-guzzling passenger vehicles release annually. Mammoth, in comparison, can capture about nine times as much CO2 as Orca.
There are fewer than 20 such plants in the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), and they don't yet have the capacity to make a serious dent in the greenhouse gas emissions humans have dumped into the atmosphere. The IEA says that to do that, the direct air capture industry has to grow to be able to draw down 85 million metric tons of CO2 by the end of the decade. For comparison, it captures just 0.01 million metric tons today. That'll likely require a new generation of DAC plants, each capable of taking in 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year. So in the grand scheme of things, Mammoth -- with the capacity to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 a year -- isn't quite so mammoth. Even so, Mammoth is an important test case for scaling up Direct Air Capture tech.
There are fewer than 20 such plants in the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), and they don't yet have the capacity to make a serious dent in the greenhouse gas emissions humans have dumped into the atmosphere. The IEA says that to do that, the direct air capture industry has to grow to be able to draw down 85 million metric tons of CO2 by the end of the decade. For comparison, it captures just 0.01 million metric tons today. That'll likely require a new generation of DAC plants, each capable of taking in 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year. So in the grand scheme of things, Mammoth -- with the capacity to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 a year -- isn't quite so mammoth. Even so, Mammoth is an important test case for scaling up Direct Air Capture tech.
Planting trees. (Score:1)
How much CO2 would be sequestered planting an acre of trees?
Re:Planting trees. (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org] says it varies a lot, even over relatively short distances -- look for the heat map captioned "The Amazon rainforest absorbs lot carbon." https://www.treehugger.com/how... [treehugger.com] has some numbers, although I don't know what to make of the unit "tC".
Fuck the WEF. (Score:1, Interesting)
These are the same people who declared "You will own nothing and be happy," while gleefully mentioning they have operatives in high places, in pretty much every major gov't and large corporation around the world.
I drive an EV and all of my electricity comes from solar panels. Now, can you environMENTALists just let me live my life already? Sick and tired of all this "climate change" bullshit being used as an excuse for destroying freedom and instituting communism.
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Trump lost. Time to move on.
Re:Fuck the WEF. (Score:5, Funny)
Trump lost. Time to move on.
You think I need Trump for me to be selfish and irresponsible? Pfft I've been doing it my whole life.
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These are the same people who declared "You will own nothing and be happy," while gleefully mentioning they have operatives in high places, in pretty much every major gov't and large corporation around the world.
I drive an EV and all of my electricity comes from solar panels. Now, can you environMENTALists just let me live my life already? Sick and tired of all this "climate change" bullshit being used as an excuse for destroying freedom and instituting communism.
You seem to think you already 'done enough' on your part, so you are not to blame.
The flaw in your reasoning is, that the car you drive in and the solar panels on your roof still took a lot of CO2 to produce, and it'll take another decade to earn that back. And the food you eat took a lot of CO2 to produce. And so do the roads you drive on and the house you live in.
And, by being so rich that you can afford that all, you almost by definition use a lot more CO2 for your existence than a poor chap. Especially
Re: Fuck the WEF. (Score:2)
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You have a vestigial cecum - it evolved away to become the appendix and a little around it since it was a waste of energy on a mostly carnivorous diet. You are not a great ape. Your gut is not designed to ferment large amounts of fibre.
This comes as a surprise to many who have been told all their lives that dietary fibre is good for you and something terrible will happen if you have eat none. You will find the opposite if you try. You don't need any fibre, but can tolerate a small amount well. Being able to
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>Human beings need fibre & benefit from it greatly.
That's the bit that's questionable. You could go find the rare properly run trials that tested this (I couldn't find the paper I was thinking of yesterday) but anecdotally, many have tried eliminating fibre with mostly excellent results that reflect the experimental data.
Better still, try a zero fibre diet, give it a couple of weeks, see if it works or not. Most people except near the poles have never even had a zero fibre diet.
I tried all sorts of d
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Thems the papers I read. I'm not making this stuff up.
The Eat Lancet stuff - Not so much, purely epidemiological deliberately to avoid to studies that contradict their agenda.
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Hey if methane is like 1000x more of a greenhouse gas than Co2 ...
Methane is 25 times as potent as CO2 as a GHG.
Someone probably wont recognize sarcastic humor and ill likely hear about it in 3 .. 2 .. 1
I am an Aspie. We don't do sarcasm.
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Its also worth remembering the additional benefits of trees, they provide shade for animals and humans.
A house surrounded by trees will be cooler in the summer months than a house with none.
Re: Planting trees. (Score:2)
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My 50-year-old house is surrounded by trees. In the past decade, I've had to remove two of them (one after a storm that left it tilting dangerously, one because it was dying anyway), had to have the others trimmed several times to keep them from damaging the roof, and I have to remove a boatload of leaves from my yard every year (typically twice each fall).
It would be cheaper, easier and less stressful to keep my house cool through other mechanisms, plus I would be able to put solar panels on my roof. I l
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There is a simple solution for the leaves: Let them rot where they fall.
This method requires far less labor and recycles the nutrients back into your soil.
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How much CO2 would be sequestered planting an acre of trees?
How many tons of wood does an acre of trees produce per year? Not many...
Re: Planting trees. (Score:2)
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That would be the opposite of sequestered if you chopped the trees down.
That's what I used to think, but it's an incomplete view. What happens to the wood? If it is burned, of course the CO2 is returned to the air. If it decays, the picture isn't so clear, at least not to me. During decay it is eaten by microbes. Before it decays completely, it falls apart and becomes soil. More microbes eat it. Other microbes eat the microbes. It becomes part of the soil food web. Nitrogen fixing bacteria may pull nitrogen from the air and add nitrogen compounds to the soil. Nutrients are rele
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It does capture some carbon, but there's only so much of a person's body that can be covered in hemp and it decomposes over time. Using wood to build houses is much more effective since every person will use multiple tons of it. But even then it's a drop in the bucket compared to what's necessary to stop global warming.
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Take the carbon (whatever form, hemp, wood, etc) and bundle it up and bury it in old unused mines. return carbon to the lithosphere.
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The end carbon sink should be soil, IMO. Soil doesn't need to be hidden in mines. It is an asset for the world's ecosystems. You can just put it on the ground. And yes, some of the carbon and nitrogen will be outgassed again, but ideally organisms will use more of it, and their waste will support more plant growth.
The byproducts of soil life even help with root oxygenation, erosion, and nutrient runoff. If soil is the carbon sink, carbon doesn't even need to be a waste product. It is an asset when locked up
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30 second google search, so very much ballpark, many details omitted...says that a generic 'tree' captures 100kg of CO2 per year. So in order to match the Mammoth plants 36,000 tons (metric tons ?...it's Iceland) that's 360,000 trees that need to be planted to match. Seems like a lot, but apparently, via 2nd google search around 400 trees per acre (ugh, yes switching to Imperial) means only 900 acres.
What I don't understand is why 'Western" countries just don't start long term, 100 year style, leasing la
Re:Planting trees. (Score:4, Interesting)
"In summary, it can be concluded that the annual CO2 offsetting rate varies from 21.77 kg CO2/tree to 31.5 kg CO2/tree. To compensate 1 tonne of CO2, 31 to 46 trees are needed. In Europe, there are 300 to 500 trees per hectare. For calculating the figures on the Encon website, we assume a rate of 24 kg CO2/tree and an average of 500 trees per hectare. This means that 1 hectare of forest: 500 trees x 24 kg CO2/tree = 12,000 kg of CO2 offsets, i.e. 12 tonnes CO2/hectare."
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Just for perspective....
From: https://www.co2.earth/global-c... [www.co2.earth]
Annual global CO2 emissions in Gigatons
1 Gigatonne (Gt) = 1 billion tonnes
Year Fuel Land Total
2021 36.4*
2020 34.8 3.2 38.0
2019 36.7 3.8 40.5
2018 36.6 3.9 40.5
2017 35.9 3.7 39.6
2016 35.5 3.7 39.2
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36.4*10^9 / 12 = 3.03 * 10^9 hektars
3.03 * 10^9 hektars = 30.3 * 10^6 km^2
Land area on Earth (according to Wikipedia) = 148 940 000 km^2
30.3*10^6 / 148940000 = 0.203
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There are already 3.04 trillion trees on 3 billion hectares.
The historical "peak tree" was 6 trillion trees on 6 billion hectares.
You can't grow trees on a many kinds of land.
* Rocky terrain.
* Steep Terrain.
* Land with no topsoil.
* Permanently frozen land.
* Land with no water under or above ground within miles.
* Land that is the wrong temperature.
* Land with too much salt water (tho mangroves probably cover some of it)
And trees also can't grow on cropland, on cities, on roads, on beaches.
However- keep in mi
Benefits (Score:5, Insightful)
The great thing about planting trees to offset CO2 is that, compared to other methods, it's practically free. They don't require any energy generation on an ongoing basis, no maintenance, and practically no manufacturing. There are dozens of side-benefits, as well - increased animal habitat, better soil erosion and water capture in arid climates.
From an economical, bang-for-the-buck perspective, there is no reason not to invest heavily in planting trees. And by heavily, I mean a fraction of the cost of a giant carbon sequestration plant.
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The great thing is all the other benefits they have. The reality is trees don't capture much CO2, and when they mature they are neutrally releasing it as well. Providing there isn't a forest fire of course, at which point you're screwed yourself a bit.
Plant trees to help nurture the soil, provide habitats for animals, pollinators, prevent aridation and erosion. Trees are great, but we won't solve our CO2 issues with them.
Re: Planting trees. (Score:2)
Unless you periodically bury them deep underground, or throw them into an oceanic trench, it averages to 0. Unfortunately you'd be burying more than just the carbon.
Ideally someone invents some way to make very low cost closed bioreactors with microbes which only exude hydrocarbons. No water evaporation, no mineral loss, air in and hydrocarbons out.
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How much CO2 would be sequestered planting an acre of trees?
When? The problem is planting trees only temporarily sequesters CO2. At some point they stop doing so as their leaves fall, rot, and release CO2 as well. Let's just hope they don't catch fire as well.
Mind you we should absolutely plant trees. The knock on effects on the environment go far beyond that of CO2, by creating habitats for animals, stabilising soil, and potentially even changing weather patterns to prevent aridation.
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The problem is planting trees only temporarily sequesters CO2.
True, but "temporarily" can be a long time. The leaves fall and rot, but the trunk mass is still sequestered carbon and potentially a lot of it. If it gives us a 50 year head start on carbon capture, we should do it. Also, all the other nice things you said about trees.
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How much CO2 would be sequestered planting an acre of trees?
How long is a piece of string?
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How much CO2 would be sequestered planting an acre of trees?
Not enough to make any meaningful difference.
Nor will this new plant being installed make a meaningful difference. The construction of the plant will generate more CO2 than planting trees on the same land. After several years the plant may pull more CO2 than trees. Maybe wait until you have a more efficient process before you build these white elephants.
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You have to build the "white elephants" to improve the process. Why is that so hard to understand? It's because of many white elephant solar power projects that we learned solar power is always going to be a white elephant for electricity on the grid. So... maybe not the best example.
Solar power is great off the grid, but on the grid it is a waste of resources. Solar powered communication satellites, pocket calculators, maybe for robots on Mars, cabins in the woods, and such, can make sense. Solar powe
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Trees are great for other things. But they 100% guaranteed cannot solve climate change.
I'm not so sure. With rising CO2 levels the "tree line" gets higher. That means trees can grow taller, and on ground that is at a higher elevation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This means much more mass in plant matter to sequester carbon as this is a global phenomenon and means trees gaining mass in CO2 all over the world from not needing to expend as much energy in turning CO2 into more tree. This puts a natural cap on CO2 levels, as the CO2 levels rise then so does tree mass. At some point the tre
Do it, won't help... (Score:3)
We basically need to build within 10 years an industry the size of the petrochemical industry, which took a century to build. A century during which we had "unlimited" cheap resources.
https://adgefficiency.com/ener... [adgefficiency.com]
It ain't gonna happen. But go ahead, maybe we'll get lucky and some awesome new knowledge will come out of it.
Just don't count it in the scenarios to "zero carbon" until it actually does something at the scale needed.
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The problem is political. China built more high speed rail than exists in the rest of the world combined, in the space of a decade.
We should set up an international "moon shot" project to develop this kind of technology, with really significant funding.
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And how is that working out for china?
https://www.orfonline.org/expe... [orfonline.org]
The problem is, again, political.
The point is we don't know whether this can work at scale & quick enough, with all the material and energy requirements it entails.
So blindly going in might backfire spectacularly, especially if other policies assume this works out.
As I said: go ahead, try it, build it out, hoping it works out. Just don't assume it is a working part of the big solution before we know that.
Assume failure, and if this w
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China's railways are not supposed to make a profit. It's kind of amazing how that article you linked to claims to be the 116th in a series on China, but the author apparently didn't realize that China is governed by a nominally communist party that implements many socialists policies.
Cheap, fast travel is seen as a major benefit to the Chinese economy and the citizens. It also helps meet climate goals by reducing air travel.
The Chinese government took on the debt expecting to recover the cost not just from
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Disagree... The economics of it is IMO the least interesting part of that article.
Personal air travel, is about as important to get rid of as moving freight onto rails.
Quote:
However, most of such provincial construction has ignored the low- to zero- potential of the expensive routes to attract similar volumes of passenger traffic and are running at high idle capacity.
Most new HSR lines in China have witnessed a sharp decline in their “transportation density”. /endquote
Point 1: The trains are run
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China's sizable enough that some HSR probably makes sense. But you're right that shared passenger/freight rail is generally the way to go.
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Oh yes. Totally agree. The lines have to be carefully thought through.
And even in France, HSR came at the expense of freight. - maybe... All I know is freight declined since the 80s. Which correlates to HSR lines opening. In central Europe, freight doesn't seem to decline so much.Haven't checked the rest of Europe.
Building HSR is akin to building highways next to existing railways: creation of parallel infrastructure.
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Why would you expect a government service to turn a profit? That's what the government is for: providing services to it's citizens, especially ones that are unprofitable for the private sector to provide. We don't complain that public roads don't turn a profit. It's infrastructure.
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I the saying about "the best way to finish something is to start it" has some relevance here. I'd agree it's a very long road to travel, but unless we try it, we'll never get there. I'd also say this is one of (probably a hundred) different options (including switching to renewables, etc) - none of them needs to "win", they all need to do their bit and then the problem will be solved.
For me, I'd like a small one of these - something I can comfortably put in my back garden, which gets a bit of solar energy o
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We need to take it as seriously as we take a war. Instead, we're taking it about as seriously as a knock-knock joke.
Knock knock. Who's there? Doom.
Re: Do it, won't help... (Score:2)
The average life of the equipment in that century old industry is two decades at most. Technologically and resource wise it's possible, politically never.
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We don't really, we already have an industry, it's called the petrochemical industry. What is happening here is just an extension of the existing process industry, which while it did take a century to build, it never took a century to expand into new areas.
Plants like this don't get designed in a vacuum from scratch, they are built on 2 centuries of experience with industrial manufacturing.
They never make clear to how fund this stuff. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Each year, we burn *thousand* of years worth of plant growth that occurred before Fungi and Bacteria evolved evolved the ability to break down lignin of the Permian period.
Trees mainly capture carbon between their 12th and 19th year. And unless you cut them down and sequester them, they release most of the carbon back to the environment in about 2-5 years.
That's THOUSANDS.... of years. That's why trees are not going to cut it. Even specially selected fast growing trees like Red Oaks.
I'm hoping for a goo
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Trees mainly capture carbon between their 12th and 19th year.
No. Older trees generally capture more carbon, as long as they are still growing. This is because all growth occurs in a thin layer beneath the bark (the cambium) which obviously grows larger every year, and trees are (like all plants) made mostly out of atmospheric carbon. As well, established trees have more foliage, so they can engage in more photosynthesis.
What that means is still similar to what you were claiming, though. Young trees (including between the ages of 12 and 19 years) sequester very little
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Really half the planet has been logged. We are down from 6 trillion trees on 6 billion hectares to 3 trillion trees on 3 billion hectares. And a lot of that land is for human use ( crops, housing, roads ).
The last time I really dug into this the figures indicated you didn't get much storage at first and then it slowed down again after the tree reached a certain age. Also capturing roots, leaves, and smaller branches are a problem as I recall.
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Re: They never make clear to how fund this stuff. (Score:2)
Big picture, reduced consumption (mainly first world, because we do most of the consuming). With less labour and natural resources dedicated towards consumption, they can be dedicated towards sustainability megaprojects.
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Why not just plant trees?
Because trees don't actually capture much CO2, when they mature they start releasing as much CO2 through leaving and rot as they do capture it, and if there happens to be a fire you've lost everything you done.
That said we should still be planting trees for the many other benefits they bring, but you can plant your entire life and you'll have even less of an effect on CO2 than even one of these pilot plants.
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The upshot is they have had to be very creative to fund the initial development phases but ultimately anticipate that regulations / taxes will require net carbon neutrality and thus a market for capture.
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Hoping for direct to solid carbon process (Score:1)
I lack faith in any method that stores pressurized CO2 under ground. I suspect next earthquake it could be released.
But solid carbon would be good. Even better would be strands or plates of graphene.
Maybe with a good catalyst and local solar. (fine with nuclear power for it too just think local solar better option.)
Re: Hoping for direct to solid carbon process (Score:2)
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I think the problem with graphene is not that there's no use for it but that it's so expensive to produce. So if this could produce cheap graphene (which I doubt) that would be great.
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Did someone just mention space elevators? Because I thought I heard someone talking about a need for ridiculously huge numbers of graphine nanotube cables.
(But seriously, just kidding. The carbonate pump in the ocean is a similar carbon sink for which we have an existing process, although it doesn't have a practical application for humans at this time like calcium carbonates might.)
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Space elevators require unobtanium on earth. Graphene is strong enough for a space elevator on the moon tho.
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Climeworks' technology does not rely on geology to trap CO2 in its pure form. Rather, it gets injected in basaltic rocks underground, where it undergoes chemical reactions with rock and water [climeworks.com] to become carbonaceous minerals. In other words: it gets locked in a solid phase - an earthquake won't release it.
Have we run out of point sources? (Score:3)
Are these direct air capture projects a reflection of a lack of point sources available for processing; or a 'don't worry about what you are doing, we can fix it in post, really' exercise?
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This is an interesting point. I think you're right that the point sources should be a better place to capture from. CO2 comprises 1/3 of natural gas exhaust, as an example, so it should be a lot easier to capture a significant amount of CO2 from that, especially since it is already at a very high temperature when it leaves the combustion chamber.
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Are these direct air capture projects a reflection of a lack of point sources available for processing; or a 'don't worry about what you are doing, we can fix it in post, really' exercise?
No, they are part of a net-zero by 2050 policy. The IEA report says we will not be able to avoid some non-point-source CO2 emissions, for example with aviation fuels, beverages and chemicals. They only way to be net-zero is to recapture the CO2 from the atmosphere.
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The IEA report says we will not be able to avoid some non-point-source CO2 emissions, for example with aviation fuels, beverages and chemicals. They only way to be net-zero is to recapture the CO2 from the atmosphere.
I mean, that's technically true but you don't have to build a CO2 recapture plant. You can make sure those carbon sources are small enough that they are recaptured from the atmosphere naturally via ocean absorption, plants or algae. Alternatively, you can make stuff like biodiesel for aircraft so they never burn fossil fuels in the first place.
Gas-guzzling? (Score:1)
roughly equivalent to how much climate pollution 790 gas-guzzling passenger vehicles
Is 'gas-guzzling' an ISO classification or the writer's opinion of all ICE vehicles?
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Is 'gas-guzzling' an ISO classification
Were your feelings hurt? Buy an EV.
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yes, there goes 4 gas-sipping vehicles to 1 gas-guzzling vehicles.
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The real mystery is here:
" 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year", "pollution 790 gas-guzzling passenger vehicles release annually"
That's 5 tons per vehicle per year, 10,000 lbs per year, 30 lbs per day.
I googled how much co2 a car produces on one gallon and got answers between 5 and 20 lbs. With a gallon of gasoline weighing 6 lbs and oxygen being consumed in the burning of the fuel.
So the average car burn 1.5 to 6 gallons each day?
Taking the average, 3.75 gallons, times 18mpg is what I found roughly for a n
Greenwash (Score:3)
Direct air capture industry must grow to be able to draw down 85 million tons of CO2 by end of decade.(8ys)
Today 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide/yr is best direct air capture system we have (ORCA) equivalent of 790cars emissions/yr
Yet we continue to emit 34Billion tonnes more/yr
Not gonna happen is it ?
Aren't these just make a net carbon increase? (Score:2)
Is it still true that these plants would offset more CO2 by putting simply their energy into the grid than running the plant? I skimmed TFA but didn't see any numbers.
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As a general rule, the more steps it takes, the more energy is lost. You're probably correct. If that solar energy is just pumped to the grid, it would stop the production of some equivalent tonnage of CO2 probably far greater than what that same energy would remove from the atmosphere using this technology.
But, that is not the point.
The point is to get fat government research grants at a time when climate "research" is politically popular.
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The article is incredibly vague about how this works but the key thing is siting it next to a geothermal power plant. Suitable geothermal sites tend to be spewing vast amount of carbon into the air, whether tapped or not. It's a pretty ideal place to capture carbon from air.
Generating geothermal electricity leaves a lot of low grade waste heat, the carbon -> rock process needs heat, seems a no brainer directly using it for capture locally, especially if the plant is too far from habitation to supply heat
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But how much carbon went into the steel and other materials used to build the plant? How much fossil fuel to ship the materials around? If this thing is supposed to take a net amount of carbon out of the air, you have to factor in how much carbon was emitted to build it. How many years until the thing pays for itself and stops effectively huffing its own farts?
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If the arithmetic fails to show net carbon benefit over reasonable timescales, I expect the entire industry to be priced out of it's market by carbon taxes on those construction materials, before it leaves the pilot phase.
The pilots need to be run, whatever the final decision.
Thermodynamics (Score:5, Insightful)
It's gonna take a boatload of energy to run these carbon capture things. That's the nature of the beast. If they are worth running, then they have to be powered by something that doesn't generate more carbon dioxide. Why don't we just replace other carbon generating energy sources with the thing we're gonna be powering these capture devices with and cut out the middle man.
I'm gonna call BS on this whole process. It smells like the corn to ethanol debacle which is mostly just a welfare program for rich farmers.
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We don't have time for logic. The time to act is now! We have climate doomsayers that need jobs now. As long as the tech makes us feel good it does not matter if it is the right thing to do. How long have you been an American anyway?
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Perhaps this is why the thing is located in Iceland where most if not all their power is generated by Geothermic methods.
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Why not spend the money on a long-distance transmission cable to send the geothermal energy to mainland Europe and take a few coal plants offline instead? That seems like it will put a bigger dent in carbon per joule of geothermal than this thing.
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Based on this map it doesn't look like it would be much of an issue. I mean I'm sure it would be expensive, but as far as depth goes not a big deal.
https://earth.google.com/web/@... [google.com]
The deepest power cable is at 1600 meters. If it's feasible to go from Iceland to the Faroe Islands and then to the UK, it also wouldn't be as long as the longest underwater power cable.
Re:Thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
from the article: "... both Mammoth and Orca are located within the ON Power Geothermal Park at Hellisheiði, so they can use nearby renewable geothermal energy and waste heat to separate CO2 from air"
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Our entire way of life is based on middle-men. It makes a pretty good living.
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It's gonna take a boatload of energy to run these carbon capture things. That's the nature of the beast. If they are worth running, then they have to be powered by something that doesn't generate more carbon dioxide. Why don't we just replace other carbon generating energy sources with the thing we're gonna be powering these capture devices with and cut out the middle man.
What makes you think we shouldn't do both? It's a simple calculation; carbon output dodged vs carbon removed from the atmosphere. One would assume they would do such a calculation before even considering this.
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Well, until there are 0 fossil fuel plants within a reasonable transmission range of the site , you are better off just generating electricity and closing additional fossil fuel plants. And even then, if you've got excess generating capacity after going 100% carbon neutral on generation, how about relocating an energy-hungry factory away from some other region that is using fossil fuel to use that power. Both of those things will have a much bigger impact. This smells like a grift.
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Money is a factor as well as carbon. It could be extremely expensive to move a large factory to a different country (not to mention, not a zero carbon process), and that money could perhaps be put to better use elsewhere. Though already a lot of aluminum is shipped to Iceland for smelting because it's such an energy intensive process (or maybe smelting is the wrong word but some kind of processing).
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As a chemist, I think a lot about energy. I'm struggling with this carbon capture thing.
I was thinking about this too. Problem is, CO2 is just so darn dilute in the open atmosphere. It's really difficult to capture substantial amounts of it. Even capturing it from smokestacks has got to be hard. Smokestack emissions can't be more than 20% CO2, probably much, much less, because there's all the nitrogen, water vapor, and uncombusted oxygen.
It occurred to me what might work is if we rebuild power plants so they combust, for example, natural gas and pure oxygen. Now the exhaust is entirely water v
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It's obvious that due to inefficiency inherent to physical reality it will take more energy to capture carbon than to not release it, so you're spot on. There is no level on which it makes sense. If you want to make burning fuels carbon neutral, they need to come from carbon neutral sources... period.
However, the geothermal power used is base load power, it doesn't really load follow. The turbines that I've seen have used fixed blades. You can run them or not run them as you like, but you can't run them up
Life: No-one's getting out alive (Score:2)
Translation: We're fucked. That's why the focus is on not making CO2 but we're 20 years late on a last-minute schedule, so there will be consequences.
Boondoggle, HO! (Score:1)
Not convinced that it'll work (Score:1)
If you're going to do direct air capture (Score:2)
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They chose to put it at the site of a geothermal energy plant so it can use non-fossil fuel energy.
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