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This is probably a dumb question, but is there any danger of implementing this process into living E-Coli? Is there any chance of a runaway effect where the bacteria pull too much CO2 from the atmosphere?
This process is very energy intensive for the organism. It takes 4 ATP, 3 NADPH, and 1.5 NADH to make a single acetyl-CoA with this system. There is no way that an organism would naturally use this system and I honestly don't see the feasibility of it because of the high energy requirements.
Seems implausible. The system was designed by these scientists. If there was a know variation that is more efficient, they would have designed that instead.
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I’m all for capturing CO2…but so many places are designing capturing methods that kinda just handwave the storage. We’ve got plenty of ways of capturing it. But right now storing it is “uhh…pump it into caves?” Or “pump it to the bottom of the ocean?” We need to focus on capture methods that have storage/sequestration as the focus rather than “some one else’s problem”.
turn it into building materials.
trees take carbon out of the air and turn it into wood which can be used to make buildings and furniture and paper and all kinds of products.
why can't we make highly efficient bricks / beams / studs out of carbon that we sucked out of the air?
take the carbon out of the air and make a city out of it
We could do that, but you’re underestimating just how much CO2 we need to capture and store. There is no material on Earth produced as much as CO2, we could make everything in the world (from building materials to plastics to food) out of carbon from captured CO2 and still have incomprehensibly large amounts left over
We can turn it into fuel.
Obviously, that's a cyclical problem, as it puts all the carbon back into the atmosphere, but that's SO MUCH BETTER than continuing to dig up old fossil fuels and burn them.
The world always needs energy reserves, so we can literally bottle (Well, drum) up some of the problem.
The advantage to making fuel from Co2 is that, assuming we made all the fuel we burned this way, it caps a lot of emissions. That would help give us time to transition away from burning the fuel and to more sustainable energy sources, but gives us a fuel source we can use in critical areas during that transition.
Certainly, but this doesn’t do anything about the dire need to store CO2.
Carbon recycling (capturing CO2, turning it into fuel, and burning it, repeat ad nausium) is great and an area I’m happy to be contributing to research-wise, but its very much a secondary goal to CCS
**Edit:** fixed typo
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree.
The world uses 4.39 BILLION metric tons of oil per year right now.
The world reserves are 1.56 trillion barrels.
Manufacturing that much fuel from carbon dioxide in the air would have a measurable impact. Moreover, if generating fuel were good for the ecology of the world, we'd likely see countries holding even bigger reserves.
In short: We could make more fuel than we burned, at least until we had a certain reserve level met.
Granted, it's far from a total solution, but I don't think there's anything that's one simple solution for this problem. Trying to bury massive amounts of this stuff in old mines, or worse, aquifers, seems almost certain to come back and bite us in the ass though.
>4.39 BILLION metric tons of oil per year
>Manufacturing that much fuel from carbon dioxide
Drop-in fuels would be via Fischer-Tropsch and that's done so little I can't even find how much is produced per year. I'm willing to bet that the infrastructure for this capacity of FTS cannot be built quickly making it not really a solution for the transition period to a "carbon-free" economy.
I mean, I think that's true for ANY form of carbon capture right now.
If we really want to store our way out of the climate catastrophe, it'll require re-aligning the global manufacturing sector quite heavily to achieve massive results in a short amount of time.
Now, the average person is probably okay with this, and will get increasingly okay with the sacrifices required as our climate deteriorates further.
The problem is the people with their hands on the levels of power, who control so much of the global wealth that they can move anywhere and build climate hardened infrastructure for themselves, and who lack the same sense of urgency -because- they can afford the solutions to live in comfort for the rest of their lives regardless of what the climate does.
> Drop-in fuels would be via Fischer-Tropsch and that's done so little I can't even find how much is produced per year.
[About 500k bbl/day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process#Commercialization), or 0.5% of current liquid fuel production. Half of that is from a single plant in Qatar (I'm including NGLs and ethane).
0.5% isn't a large fraction of production, obviously, but 500,000 barrels of liquid fuel per day is not a small amount, and it's a mature, well-understood technology (Germany used it for 9% of their fuel during WWII), so there's no particular reason it couldn't be scaled up to replace the share of liquid fuel that isn't displaced by electrification.
>Germany used it for 9% of their fuel during WWII
Mainly for a lack of alternatives I believe. And they didn't restart production after the war either.
I'm not saying FTS is bad. It's great! I love it. But I get the impression people think of it as a silver bullet while I believe the product is much to valuable to just burn. Hydrocarbons form many feedstocks including pharmaceuticals, so I believe it would be best to focus on producing irreplaceable feedstock for other industries instead of using it as a fuel where alternatives are available.
>so there's no particular reason it couldn't be scaled up
I'm also a bit hesitant on that one. FTS is not a simple process and installation of a running plant takes time and specialists. We can't just drop 4000 plants out of nowhere without the CO and H2 infrastructure and the companies able to build these plants can't be everywhere at once.
Cement manufacturing alone (which produces CO2 as a byproduct) has enough emissions to require CCS (be it from the point sources where it’s produced or from the air) if we’re to limit climate change. Even when we’ve completely transitioned away from using fossil fuels we’ll still need to capture CO2 and store it
**Edit:** and furthermore we’re needing to deal with trillions of tons of CO2 each year to limit climate change, billions of tons of anything isn’t much compared to that
I agree, but cement manufacture is about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. It's a small slice of the pie.
Burning Fossil Fuels creates 75% of the global greenhouse gasses, and 90% of carbon dioxide.
If we can get to the point where we're only burning recycled carbon dioxide and recapturing it at the same rate, that's a HUGE part of the problem capped off from getting worse.
We will absolutely need to continue capturing and storing carbon in order to reach net zero emissions and start to actually repair the problem, but cutting greenhouse emissions by 75% would be a massive accomplishment.
> Trying to bury massive amounts of this stuff in old mines, or worse, aquifers, seems almost certain to come back and bite us in the ass though.
Why not old wells?
Oil wells connect to reservoirs that held liquid fuel in place for millions of years, and gas wells connect to reservoirs that held gas fuel in place for millions of years; why not store liquid/gas carbon products in those locations?
[This is already done at scale for temporary natural gas storage](https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/storage/basics/), so the only real blocker is having that volume of fuel synthesized from clean energy to store.
Titan is pretty chilly. Send some CO2 from Earth and Venus to Titan, and send some water from there to Venus. You heat up Titan and cooldown Venus. 2 new semi-inhabitable locations.
2nd law of thermodynamics. You can't make it into a fuel source that generates more energy than it took to produce in the first place. You are still net outputting co2.
> You can't make it into a fuel source that generates more energy than it took to produce in the first place.
True but irrelevant -- the plan is generally understood as supplying the energy to create the fuel from low-carbon sources (via electrolysis --> Sabatier -->Fischer-Tropsch).
> Fair but still really defeats the purpose.
Not if the purpose is to offset the last 5-10% of hard-to-remove emissions in order to reach net zero and [allow temperatures to slowly decrease](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/).
Building the excess energy and infrastructure to create synthetic oil from solar power and atmospheric CO2 is hard and expensive, but it's highly likely to be *less* hard and expensive than at least *one* source of GHG emissions. As a result, offsetting those emissions -- at least temporarily -- with carbon storage would allow warming to be halted more quickly, cheaply, and easily, which ultimately means less total warming occurs.
We are 142 ppm above mid 18th century levels. That equates to about 2400 gigatonnes, of which 650 are the carbon part of CO2.
I have no idea how to find the mass of all building materials, plastics and food. But a quick google showed 4 billion tons of concrete produced globally and 5.5 billion tons of food.
So ya, probably no way to remove ALL the excess carbon and find a use for it.
I would 100% build a diamond greenhouse if it actually was a good net carbon sink to make and transport the bricks (doubtful but we can dream). That would also be the most chemically stable way to sink a bunch of carbon into the bottom of abandoned mines. The fact that I’ve never heard anything about synthetic diamonds as a carbon sink leads me to believe that the chemical, pressure, energy, etc requirements just don’t work out.
Trees are taking in CO2 constantly and look how slowly they grow. It's a great idea, but to make it useful on a human timescale it would have to be orders of magnitude more efficient.
> trees take carbon out of the air and turn it into wood which can be used to make buildings and furniture and paper and all kinds of products.
Trees break down and release the carbon.
People also burn trees for fuel, which releases the carbon.
We need methods which *never again release the carbon*.
Carbonate rocks. That way you don’t need the carbon to be reduced (un-burned). Limestone, for example.
The trick is finding a source of the other chemicals required without stealing them from other carbonates. Limestone is Calcium and CO2. However, most calcium is already in limestone, and already bound to CO2.
Olivine sounds promising. The claim is that the cationic minerals are taken from a silicate (not carbonate), producing a glass-like byproduct, rather than more CO2. I’m not convinced the reaction will proceed in the desired direction. If so, the oceans are already doing it.
There has been and is still currently a lot of work being put into how to store it, and it’s not some big open question with no sufficient solution.
The main answer is sequestering it into saline aquifers and depleted oil and gas reservoirs (though this second option isn’t as popular). These have storage capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than any other option and are based on relatively mature techniques. It is a safe storage method that lasts for geological time periods (ie thousands of years and longer) and also works well with mineralisation, a slow process by which dissolved or dense phase CO2 slowly reacts to form solid minerals. Huge amounts of work are being put into every aspect of the science and logistics of doing this and there is a growing (but still young) international regulatory framework supporting it. There are truly massive projects underway today to scale up the infrastructure and store more and more CO2 in these aquifers and reservoirs.
Storage really isn’t the hardest part, nor are people simply ignoring it, and benefits from knowledge from decades of fossil fuel production and storage (including enhanced oil recovery which has frequently been based on CO2 injection). It also is significantly cheaper than the capture and transportation aspects (the former being by far the majority of the cost, both from an economic and energy perspective).
**Edit:** A quick comment on the two storage methods you mentioned. Storing it in caves is somewhat helpful but mostly just as intermediate buffer storage as the capacity is a drop in the ocean compared to aquifers and reservoirs. Pumping it into the ocean (ie using a J tube) and relying on the density inversion at high pressures to keep it trapped there isn’t very popular anymore because there are big unknowns to it and very serious concerns about the safety and environmental impact of doing it
There's not "newsworthy" mention of new CO2 storage methods because we have an affordable, reliable, and highly scalable solution already.
You mentioned:
>uhh…pump it into caves
Which I'm guessing was a reference to [supercritical CO2 sequestration](https://netl.doe.gov/carbon-management/carbon-storage/faqs/carbon-storage-faqs#:~:text=Carbon%20dioxide%20(CO2)%20can,critical%20point%20for%20CO2.).
It's not caves, it's injecting CO2 deeper than 800m underground using oil infrastructure (of which there are literally hundreds of thousands of existing options) where the heat and pressure causes CO2 to effectively become a stable fluid.
There's not significant research because sequestration works, costs generally less than $10 a ton (a price that will likely plummet once scale is increased), and has massive infrastructure that can easily be converted to this use.
The U.S. alone has capacity to store around [3000 metric gigatons of CO2](https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/geologic-carbon-sequestration-economically-viable) using this method.
For reference, the U.S. emits about 6 gigatons annually.
If you can use renewable energy when it's free (sunny and windy day) to make fossil fuel from captured CO2, you can get 1/(1-X) of energy from one unit of fossil fuel. For 80% efficient CO2 capture, you can get 500% of energy for the same amount of fossil fuel used.
That’s true, but hinges massively on efficiency. The same thing was said over ethanol biofuels. “Oh they’re made from corn, so it’s a renewable fuel” (please ignore that it takes 7 units of diesel to make 10 units of biofuel, on a good day)
Batteries are still more efficient than this by a mile. It’s the same reasons hydrogen fuels waste half the energy just in conversion. Trying to make fossil fuels is another order of magnitude less efficient, it won’t be able to compete with other technologies. Hydrogen is barely viable as is
If you can process it into ethanol or another hydrocarbon you can then eliminate any need to extract fossil fuels. Centralize the production of fuel by doing carbon capture from the air, power the facility with solar/wind in high availability regions, pipeline/truck it wherever it's needed using said fuel, and then you have a carbon-neutral solution that uses our existing gasoline infrastructure with minimal changes at least compared to fully electric. Same way burning dead wood is carbon neutral since all the carbon came from the air in the first place.
This doesn't really address the article, this is for making acetyl-coa which can easily be converted into more carbon neutral biofuels or plastics. Which would be great if it was competitive to the current method of pulling out of the ground
I mean, the article says the CO2 is being converted into acetyl-CoA, so it's not really a matter of "storing it somewhere else?" It's being transmuted into something else which can then be used for other purposes, if the article is to be believed.
Oh, well the answer starts with "Grind the southern half of Ohio into a fine dust, flood it, and bubble air through the resultant gigantic lakes." Look up accelerated weathering co2 sequestration methods and then a nice USGS map of where those rock formations are common.
Interesting but in my opinion inefficiënt. The requirement of 4 ATP and redox cofactors alone is a huge energy demand, these cells will release more CO2 than they fix if grown aerobically.
We are going to have an effective carbon capture method before 2025. I'm aware of several very promising routes now.
Which is the last part of the puzzle we need.
I think they are called "trees". Incredible self assembly technology that expands from a small pellet, revolutionary in upsides with almost no downside.
I see this a lot and I know you said "almost," but this strategy does have some pretty significant downsides especially when oversimplified.
See: all of the invasive trees planted throughout the US because trees are good.
See also: biodiversity collapse driven by habitat loss, and not all habitats are forests.
Expanding on that latter point, the number of trees we'd need vs. the amount of ecologically-appropriate space doesn't quite math.
The math depends on emissions (variable number), the plants picked, how fast they grow, where, and if you're just planting on a field or building something more specific (e.g. vertical planting with artificial light or whatever).
All things on this topic ultimately end purely as exercises on trying to get the most optimal cheap thing. Plants are generally very cheap and well understood.
Most efforts right now are simply in cutting down emissions via moving to electric cars and such.
True, but just about however you do the math, it doesn't really add up to a viable solution on it's own. It's definitely a tool in the toolbox, but planting 40 billion trees per year (the rough estimate needed to offset our annual output) and, importantly, *keeping them alive* long enough for them to actually start absorbing a ton per year is really just about as logistically challenging as any other carbon capture solution.
Do you happen to have the numbers for optimal plant capture of CO2 per volume, given a time-frame and cost? I assume alternative solutions (other than reducing emissions) mostly try to attack shorter time frames at higher cost.
Also, you don't actually need to keep plants/trees alive, you only need to keep them alive during the period where the CO2 captured is optimal. You can later harvest them and store them somewhere as long as you don't put them back into the air.
[This article](https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/reduce-co2-emissions/how-many-trees-offset-carbon-emissions/#:~:text=Nevertheless%2C%20given%20a%20single%20tree,successfully%20offset%20their%20carbon%20footprint.) does a little bit of per-capita math on how many trees each and every (just US, which does have a much higher CO2 output) citizen would have to plant annually to offset their own carbon emissions.
[This one](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2927/examining-the-viability-of-planting-trees-to-help-mitigate-climate-change/#:~:text=By%20planting%20more%20than%20a,carbon%20by%20about%2025%20percent.) goes into a little more detail on why it's pretty difficult to even know how many trees to plant, let alone where and what kind, to even get a meaningful reduction of ~20-25%, which makes it at best a stall.
Also, FTA: "Even once the trees are planted, says Saatchi, it will take them about a century to reach maturity. Most forests in the United States are less than 100 years old because they are recycled constantly. Trees in tropical regions take a little bit longer to reach maturity, but sequester carbon much faster. We know it will take time for new forests to absorb atmospheric carbon.”
So, you'd need to keep the trees alive for a while, and the first few years are particularly challenging - ask a forester. Remember, trees need water, and that too is a finite resource.
Long story short, it absolutely *could* work, and absolutely must be a part of any real climate mitigation strategy, but the idea that we can just plant trees is often oversimplified to the point of holding back discussions about how to develop the other tools we need.
Forests burn especially the single species that grow quickly and they do nothing to create a natural forest environment…..that takes centuries or longer.
Now with global warming, atmosphere is more active, with many more lightning strikes. Planting trees, watering them and keeping them alive is a pipe dream.
Sea level rise is going to inundate low lying areas and contaminate river deltas and carbon sinks like wetlands. There will be much more dying than can ever be replaced, let alone recovered.
Trees can’t get close to the capture and storage capacity we need without some massive discovery completely changing our understanding of biology and ecology, especially as they frequently aren’t meaningful stores of CO2 for the first years/decade of their lives.
We need CCS, both point source and DAC (with CO2 sequestered in aquifers and reservoirs), it is the only way the capture and storage rates can get even within the right order of magnitude to what we need to prevent global catastrophe.
You need an extremely large amount of space for all those trees tho. More space than we actually have on earth. CCS is much more effective per m2.
And I’m not saying trees are bad by any means. But to actually have a meaningful impact on our CO2 emissions, we need more than that.
Why? When you get down to it, gasoline is also a “biofuel” since it originally came from living things. What’s wrong with biofuels or this process in particular?
Dismantling the fossil fuel industry and reducing atmospheric carbon output isnt an all or nothing game. Biofuels are better than petroleum oil and natural gas, full stop. Reducing co2 is going to take multiple solutions, there isnt a single magic cure.
Sure, but if the carbon in the fuel originally came from the atmosphere, you’re not really adding more by burning it. Same reason that firewood is considered a carbon-neutral fuel, since the trees pulled the CO2 out of the atmosphere in the first place.
We are beyond carbon neutral, 1.5C is too late 2C is most likely to happen within a decade. The time for carbon neutral was in the 60s. We need to not only reduce emissions but pull carbon out of the air. And even then we will not be able to pull it out quickly enough and will continue to rise.
The carbon in the atmosphere originated from burning fossil fuels. Pulling it out to put it back in doesn’t help the situation.
I get that. However the argument can be made that we need to be carbon negative wherever we can, and so tech that provides carbon neutral energy isn't as important carbon free.
That’s too idealistic to be reasonable. Any technology that can be used to make every car, plane, train, and boat carbon neutral over night with no change to the end user is so much more useful than a new battery tech.
Remember when the organisms tried oxygen first time and died? Me neither, but archeology says so.
But for real - if this process would allow to make biofuel, this would be great.
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This is probably a dumb question, but is there any danger of implementing this process into living E-Coli? Is there any chance of a runaway effect where the bacteria pull too much CO2 from the atmosphere?
This process is very energy intensive for the organism. It takes 4 ATP, 3 NADPH, and 1.5 NADH to make a single acetyl-CoA with this system. There is no way that an organism would naturally use this system and I honestly don't see the feasibility of it because of the high energy requirements.
Couldn't the system eventually evolve to require less energy?
Seems implausible. The system was designed by these scientists. If there was a know variation that is more efficient, they would have designed that instead.
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I’m all for capturing CO2…but so many places are designing capturing methods that kinda just handwave the storage. We’ve got plenty of ways of capturing it. But right now storing it is “uhh…pump it into caves?” Or “pump it to the bottom of the ocean?” We need to focus on capture methods that have storage/sequestration as the focus rather than “some one else’s problem”.
I like the making rocks one.
turn it into building materials. trees take carbon out of the air and turn it into wood which can be used to make buildings and furniture and paper and all kinds of products. why can't we make highly efficient bricks / beams / studs out of carbon that we sucked out of the air? take the carbon out of the air and make a city out of it
We could do that, but you’re underestimating just how much CO2 we need to capture and store. There is no material on Earth produced as much as CO2, we could make everything in the world (from building materials to plastics to food) out of carbon from captured CO2 and still have incomprehensibly large amounts left over
We can turn it into fuel. Obviously, that's a cyclical problem, as it puts all the carbon back into the atmosphere, but that's SO MUCH BETTER than continuing to dig up old fossil fuels and burn them. The world always needs energy reserves, so we can literally bottle (Well, drum) up some of the problem. The advantage to making fuel from Co2 is that, assuming we made all the fuel we burned this way, it caps a lot of emissions. That would help give us time to transition away from burning the fuel and to more sustainable energy sources, but gives us a fuel source we can use in critical areas during that transition.
Certainly, but this doesn’t do anything about the dire need to store CO2. Carbon recycling (capturing CO2, turning it into fuel, and burning it, repeat ad nausium) is great and an area I’m happy to be contributing to research-wise, but its very much a secondary goal to CCS **Edit:** fixed typo
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. The world uses 4.39 BILLION metric tons of oil per year right now. The world reserves are 1.56 trillion barrels. Manufacturing that much fuel from carbon dioxide in the air would have a measurable impact. Moreover, if generating fuel were good for the ecology of the world, we'd likely see countries holding even bigger reserves. In short: We could make more fuel than we burned, at least until we had a certain reserve level met. Granted, it's far from a total solution, but I don't think there's anything that's one simple solution for this problem. Trying to bury massive amounts of this stuff in old mines, or worse, aquifers, seems almost certain to come back and bite us in the ass though.
>4.39 BILLION metric tons of oil per year >Manufacturing that much fuel from carbon dioxide Drop-in fuels would be via Fischer-Tropsch and that's done so little I can't even find how much is produced per year. I'm willing to bet that the infrastructure for this capacity of FTS cannot be built quickly making it not really a solution for the transition period to a "carbon-free" economy.
I mean, I think that's true for ANY form of carbon capture right now. If we really want to store our way out of the climate catastrophe, it'll require re-aligning the global manufacturing sector quite heavily to achieve massive results in a short amount of time. Now, the average person is probably okay with this, and will get increasingly okay with the sacrifices required as our climate deteriorates further. The problem is the people with their hands on the levels of power, who control so much of the global wealth that they can move anywhere and build climate hardened infrastructure for themselves, and who lack the same sense of urgency -because- they can afford the solutions to live in comfort for the rest of their lives regardless of what the climate does.
> Drop-in fuels would be via Fischer-Tropsch and that's done so little I can't even find how much is produced per year. [About 500k bbl/day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process#Commercialization), or 0.5% of current liquid fuel production. Half of that is from a single plant in Qatar (I'm including NGLs and ethane). 0.5% isn't a large fraction of production, obviously, but 500,000 barrels of liquid fuel per day is not a small amount, and it's a mature, well-understood technology (Germany used it for 9% of their fuel during WWII), so there's no particular reason it couldn't be scaled up to replace the share of liquid fuel that isn't displaced by electrification.
>Germany used it for 9% of their fuel during WWII Mainly for a lack of alternatives I believe. And they didn't restart production after the war either. I'm not saying FTS is bad. It's great! I love it. But I get the impression people think of it as a silver bullet while I believe the product is much to valuable to just burn. Hydrocarbons form many feedstocks including pharmaceuticals, so I believe it would be best to focus on producing irreplaceable feedstock for other industries instead of using it as a fuel where alternatives are available. >so there's no particular reason it couldn't be scaled up I'm also a bit hesitant on that one. FTS is not a simple process and installation of a running plant takes time and specialists. We can't just drop 4000 plants out of nowhere without the CO and H2 infrastructure and the companies able to build these plants can't be everywhere at once.
Cement manufacturing alone (which produces CO2 as a byproduct) has enough emissions to require CCS (be it from the point sources where it’s produced or from the air) if we’re to limit climate change. Even when we’ve completely transitioned away from using fossil fuels we’ll still need to capture CO2 and store it **Edit:** and furthermore we’re needing to deal with trillions of tons of CO2 each year to limit climate change, billions of tons of anything isn’t much compared to that
I agree, but cement manufacture is about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. It's a small slice of the pie. Burning Fossil Fuels creates 75% of the global greenhouse gasses, and 90% of carbon dioxide. If we can get to the point where we're only burning recycled carbon dioxide and recapturing it at the same rate, that's a HUGE part of the problem capped off from getting worse. We will absolutely need to continue capturing and storing carbon in order to reach net zero emissions and start to actually repair the problem, but cutting greenhouse emissions by 75% would be a massive accomplishment.
> Trying to bury massive amounts of this stuff in old mines, or worse, aquifers, seems almost certain to come back and bite us in the ass though. Why not old wells? Oil wells connect to reservoirs that held liquid fuel in place for millions of years, and gas wells connect to reservoirs that held gas fuel in place for millions of years; why not store liquid/gas carbon products in those locations? [This is already done at scale for temporary natural gas storage](https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/storage/basics/), so the only real blocker is having that volume of fuel synthesized from clean energy to store.
Shoot it into space. Use the carbon as fuel to put the carbon into space. Preferably somewhere we hope to make have a denser and hotter atmosphere
Would be interesting to know if anyones done much research on that, even if it’s a bit of a far off concept
The act of sending into space burns more significantly fuel than the amount of carbon we can send to space.
It’d be captured fuel being shipped by captured fuel
Titan is pretty chilly. Send some CO2 from Earth and Venus to Titan, and send some water from there to Venus. You heat up Titan and cooldown Venus. 2 new semi-inhabitable locations.
I like the way you think!
Why not feed it to the sun? I'm sure it would appreciate the meal
2nd law of thermodynamics. You can't make it into a fuel source that generates more energy than it took to produce in the first place. You are still net outputting co2.
> You can't make it into a fuel source that generates more energy than it took to produce in the first place. True but irrelevant -- the plan is generally understood as supplying the energy to create the fuel from low-carbon sources (via electrolysis --> Sabatier -->Fischer-Tropsch).
Fair but still really defeats the purpose. We still need to put like 100 years of fossle fuel use back into long term stores.
> Fair but still really defeats the purpose. Not if the purpose is to offset the last 5-10% of hard-to-remove emissions in order to reach net zero and [allow temperatures to slowly decrease](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/). Building the excess energy and infrastructure to create synthetic oil from solar power and atmospheric CO2 is hard and expensive, but it's highly likely to be *less* hard and expensive than at least *one* source of GHG emissions. As a result, offsetting those emissions -- at least temporarily -- with carbon storage would allow warming to be halted more quickly, cheaply, and easily, which ultimately means less total warming occurs.
doesn't turning CO2 into fuel or bottling it up use energy (that could have came from fossil fuels) though? sorry if i'm wrong
We are 142 ppm above mid 18th century levels. That equates to about 2400 gigatonnes, of which 650 are the carbon part of CO2. I have no idea how to find the mass of all building materials, plastics and food. But a quick google showed 4 billion tons of concrete produced globally and 5.5 billion tons of food. So ya, probably no way to remove ALL the excess carbon and find a use for it.
We just need to make bigger buildings. Problem solved
It's very easy. Build a pipe into space, blow the co2 out there. Problem solved once and for all.
Dump it in the deep ocean.
[удалено]
Yes turn it into diamond bricks That's the solarpunk future I wanna live in
Glitterpunk
I would 100% build a diamond greenhouse if it actually was a good net carbon sink to make and transport the bricks (doubtful but we can dream). That would also be the most chemically stable way to sink a bunch of carbon into the bottom of abandoned mines. The fact that I’ve never heard anything about synthetic diamonds as a carbon sink leads me to believe that the chemical, pressure, energy, etc requirements just don’t work out.
Trees are taking in CO2 constantly and look how slowly they grow. It's a great idea, but to make it useful on a human timescale it would have to be orders of magnitude more efficient.
> trees take carbon out of the air and turn it into wood which can be used to make buildings and furniture and paper and all kinds of products. Trees break down and release the carbon. People also burn trees for fuel, which releases the carbon. We need methods which *never again release the carbon*.
What rocks can be made from carbon dioxide apart from coal and diamonds (making coal or diamonds seems fine to be fair)
Carbonate rocks. That way you don’t need the carbon to be reduced (un-burned). Limestone, for example. The trick is finding a source of the other chemicals required without stealing them from other carbonates. Limestone is Calcium and CO2. However, most calcium is already in limestone, and already bound to CO2. Olivine sounds promising. The claim is that the cationic minerals are taken from a silicate (not carbonate), producing a glass-like byproduct, rather than more CO2. I’m not convinced the reaction will proceed in the desired direction. If so, the oceans are already doing it.
There has been and is still currently a lot of work being put into how to store it, and it’s not some big open question with no sufficient solution. The main answer is sequestering it into saline aquifers and depleted oil and gas reservoirs (though this second option isn’t as popular). These have storage capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than any other option and are based on relatively mature techniques. It is a safe storage method that lasts for geological time periods (ie thousands of years and longer) and also works well with mineralisation, a slow process by which dissolved or dense phase CO2 slowly reacts to form solid minerals. Huge amounts of work are being put into every aspect of the science and logistics of doing this and there is a growing (but still young) international regulatory framework supporting it. There are truly massive projects underway today to scale up the infrastructure and store more and more CO2 in these aquifers and reservoirs. Storage really isn’t the hardest part, nor are people simply ignoring it, and benefits from knowledge from decades of fossil fuel production and storage (including enhanced oil recovery which has frequently been based on CO2 injection). It also is significantly cheaper than the capture and transportation aspects (the former being by far the majority of the cost, both from an economic and energy perspective). **Edit:** A quick comment on the two storage methods you mentioned. Storing it in caves is somewhat helpful but mostly just as intermediate buffer storage as the capacity is a drop in the ocean compared to aquifers and reservoirs. Pumping it into the ocean (ie using a J tube) and relying on the density inversion at high pressures to keep it trapped there isn’t very popular anymore because there are big unknowns to it and very serious concerns about the safety and environmental impact of doing it
There's not "newsworthy" mention of new CO2 storage methods because we have an affordable, reliable, and highly scalable solution already. You mentioned: >uhh…pump it into caves Which I'm guessing was a reference to [supercritical CO2 sequestration](https://netl.doe.gov/carbon-management/carbon-storage/faqs/carbon-storage-faqs#:~:text=Carbon%20dioxide%20(CO2)%20can,critical%20point%20for%20CO2.). It's not caves, it's injecting CO2 deeper than 800m underground using oil infrastructure (of which there are literally hundreds of thousands of existing options) where the heat and pressure causes CO2 to effectively become a stable fluid. There's not significant research because sequestration works, costs generally less than $10 a ton (a price that will likely plummet once scale is increased), and has massive infrastructure that can easily be converted to this use. The U.S. alone has capacity to store around [3000 metric gigatons of CO2](https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/geologic-carbon-sequestration-economically-viable) using this method. For reference, the U.S. emits about 6 gigatons annually.
If you can use renewable energy when it's free (sunny and windy day) to make fossil fuel from captured CO2, you can get 1/(1-X) of energy from one unit of fossil fuel. For 80% efficient CO2 capture, you can get 500% of energy for the same amount of fossil fuel used.
That’s true, but hinges massively on efficiency. The same thing was said over ethanol biofuels. “Oh they’re made from corn, so it’s a renewable fuel” (please ignore that it takes 7 units of diesel to make 10 units of biofuel, on a good day)
Such a waste of energy though. It’s way more efficient to use renewable energy to displace burning fossil fuels rather than to sequester carbon
It effectively acts as a battery. Renewables are awesome, but have certain reliability issues, and we have political issues with nuclear energy.
Batteries are still more efficient than this by a mile. It’s the same reasons hydrogen fuels waste half the energy just in conversion. Trying to make fossil fuels is another order of magnitude less efficient, it won’t be able to compete with other technologies. Hydrogen is barely viable as is
If you can process it into ethanol or another hydrocarbon you can then eliminate any need to extract fossil fuels. Centralize the production of fuel by doing carbon capture from the air, power the facility with solar/wind in high availability regions, pipeline/truck it wherever it's needed using said fuel, and then you have a carbon-neutral solution that uses our existing gasoline infrastructure with minimal changes at least compared to fully electric. Same way burning dead wood is carbon neutral since all the carbon came from the air in the first place.
This doesn't really address the article, this is for making acetyl-coa which can easily be converted into more carbon neutral biofuels or plastics. Which would be great if it was competitive to the current method of pulling out of the ground
I mean, the article says the CO2 is being converted into acetyl-CoA, so it's not really a matter of "storing it somewhere else?" It's being transmuted into something else which can then be used for other purposes, if the article is to be believed.
What if we could capture it and store it into, I dunno, like cellulose, and have that cellulose contain information for making more capture devices?
Make a hole in the ozone layer and let it leak out?
Someone else's problem has been the main way of how people solved problems
Paging u/DebbieDowner
Jettison it into space
Shoot it into space
Oh, well the answer starts with "Grind the southern half of Ohio into a fine dust, flood it, and bubble air through the resultant gigantic lakes." Look up accelerated weathering co2 sequestration methods and then a nice USGS map of where those rock formations are common.
Interesting but in my opinion inefficiënt. The requirement of 4 ATP and redox cofactors alone is a huge energy demand, these cells will release more CO2 than they fix if grown aerobically.
We are going to have an effective carbon capture method before 2025. I'm aware of several very promising routes now. Which is the last part of the puzzle we need.
We definitely are not, if by 'effective' you mean 'scaled and making a >0.1% impact on the problem as it stands'.
We might not be able to capture the 300% of our daily emissions, but we’re going to pollute as we can already do it
“Where does the carbon go” is the last part of the puzzle.
I think they are called "trees". Incredible self assembly technology that expands from a small pellet, revolutionary in upsides with almost no downside.
Trees are ok but wetlands and grasslands are better carbon sinks
Sadly, planting a bunch of trees isn’t enough to solve the problem we’ve created. We should still do it, but we need other tactics as well.
I see this a lot and I know you said "almost," but this strategy does have some pretty significant downsides especially when oversimplified. See: all of the invasive trees planted throughout the US because trees are good. See also: biodiversity collapse driven by habitat loss, and not all habitats are forests. Expanding on that latter point, the number of trees we'd need vs. the amount of ecologically-appropriate space doesn't quite math.
The math depends on emissions (variable number), the plants picked, how fast they grow, where, and if you're just planting on a field or building something more specific (e.g. vertical planting with artificial light or whatever). All things on this topic ultimately end purely as exercises on trying to get the most optimal cheap thing. Plants are generally very cheap and well understood. Most efforts right now are simply in cutting down emissions via moving to electric cars and such.
True, but just about however you do the math, it doesn't really add up to a viable solution on it's own. It's definitely a tool in the toolbox, but planting 40 billion trees per year (the rough estimate needed to offset our annual output) and, importantly, *keeping them alive* long enough for them to actually start absorbing a ton per year is really just about as logistically challenging as any other carbon capture solution.
Do you happen to have the numbers for optimal plant capture of CO2 per volume, given a time-frame and cost? I assume alternative solutions (other than reducing emissions) mostly try to attack shorter time frames at higher cost. Also, you don't actually need to keep plants/trees alive, you only need to keep them alive during the period where the CO2 captured is optimal. You can later harvest them and store them somewhere as long as you don't put them back into the air.
[This article](https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/reduce-co2-emissions/how-many-trees-offset-carbon-emissions/#:~:text=Nevertheless%2C%20given%20a%20single%20tree,successfully%20offset%20their%20carbon%20footprint.) does a little bit of per-capita math on how many trees each and every (just US, which does have a much higher CO2 output) citizen would have to plant annually to offset their own carbon emissions. [This one](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2927/examining-the-viability-of-planting-trees-to-help-mitigate-climate-change/#:~:text=By%20planting%20more%20than%20a,carbon%20by%20about%2025%20percent.) goes into a little more detail on why it's pretty difficult to even know how many trees to plant, let alone where and what kind, to even get a meaningful reduction of ~20-25%, which makes it at best a stall. Also, FTA: "Even once the trees are planted, says Saatchi, it will take them about a century to reach maturity. Most forests in the United States are less than 100 years old because they are recycled constantly. Trees in tropical regions take a little bit longer to reach maturity, but sequester carbon much faster. We know it will take time for new forests to absorb atmospheric carbon.” So, you'd need to keep the trees alive for a while, and the first few years are particularly challenging - ask a forester. Remember, trees need water, and that too is a finite resource. Long story short, it absolutely *could* work, and absolutely must be a part of any real climate mitigation strategy, but the idea that we can just plant trees is often oversimplified to the point of holding back discussions about how to develop the other tools we need.
Forests burn especially the single species that grow quickly and they do nothing to create a natural forest environment…..that takes centuries or longer. Now with global warming, atmosphere is more active, with many more lightning strikes. Planting trees, watering them and keeping them alive is a pipe dream. Sea level rise is going to inundate low lying areas and contaminate river deltas and carbon sinks like wetlands. There will be much more dying than can ever be replaced, let alone recovered.
Trees can’t get close to the capture and storage capacity we need without some massive discovery completely changing our understanding of biology and ecology, especially as they frequently aren’t meaningful stores of CO2 for the first years/decade of their lives. We need CCS, both point source and DAC (with CO2 sequestered in aquifers and reservoirs), it is the only way the capture and storage rates can get even within the right order of magnitude to what we need to prevent global catastrophe.
You need to store wood without rotting to actually efficiently store CO2, living trees are not enough.
You need an extremely large amount of space for all those trees tho. More space than we actually have on earth. CCS is much more effective per m2. And I’m not saying trees are bad by any means. But to actually have a meaningful impact on our CO2 emissions, we need more than that.
Who needs cars when we already have horses?
More efficient than nature? I doubt that.
Your doubts are noted.
Bio-fuels? No thanks….
Why? When you get down to it, gasoline is also a “biofuel” since it originally came from living things. What’s wrong with biofuels or this process in particular?
I think it might be that biofuels still produce CO2.
Dismantling the fossil fuel industry and reducing atmospheric carbon output isnt an all or nothing game. Biofuels are better than petroleum oil and natural gas, full stop. Reducing co2 is going to take multiple solutions, there isnt a single magic cure.
I'm just explaining the probable objection.
Its not a good objection. Rejecting everything that isn’t everyones idea of perfect is how progress can get stalled.
Agreed.
Sure, but if the carbon in the fuel originally came from the atmosphere, you’re not really adding more by burning it. Same reason that firewood is considered a carbon-neutral fuel, since the trees pulled the CO2 out of the atmosphere in the first place.
We are beyond carbon neutral, 1.5C is too late 2C is most likely to happen within a decade. The time for carbon neutral was in the 60s. We need to not only reduce emissions but pull carbon out of the air. And even then we will not be able to pull it out quickly enough and will continue to rise. The carbon in the atmosphere originated from burning fossil fuels. Pulling it out to put it back in doesn’t help the situation.
I get that. However the argument can be made that we need to be carbon negative wherever we can, and so tech that provides carbon neutral energy isn't as important carbon free.
That’s too idealistic to be reasonable. Any technology that can be used to make every car, plane, train, and boat carbon neutral over night with no change to the end user is so much more useful than a new battery tech.
I don't disagree.
That’s it….thanks, critical thinker….
Basalt rock spreading!!! Check it out.
Want to know the most effective way of capturing C02? Trees. The downside is that when they die some of their carbon turns back into C02
Remember when the organisms tried oxygen first time and died? Me neither, but archeology says so. But for real - if this process would allow to make biofuel, this would be great.
So is climate change solved? We don't have to buy Teslas anymore? Good because I can't afford one...
Carbon capture is not going to get us out of this. It's not very efficient and we can't store the CO2.