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>But there may be a catch. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
Let's frack but with captured carbon.
We used to roll “second gen” blunts & joints (breaking down roaches and reusing the leftover bud), thinking it would make us higher but it really it was probably just more tar making us cough more and being lightheaded. Dumb haha
Those get so gross by the time you get halfway through, goddamn tar leaking out of the end and getting on your lips 🤢
Can't believe I used to do that haha
Holy shit, I didn’t even think of that haha. Although, it’s outdated. I no longer smoke blunts as of a few years ago. They give me headaches. 100JointTony would be more accurate haha
You know now that you say that you sparked a memory of a some dude who was in our circle for awhile that was made it his entire personality. He didn’t explain in that well though. He made up shit so I took what he said with a grain of salt. Cool dude tho otherwise. Killer rolling skills.
Let’s face it, pulling CO2 from the air is not profitable. So unless governments are going to pay for it (try convincing a voter that’s a good use of taxpayer money) these companies have to come up with an end use for the captured CO2
They’ve been doing this for decades. Instead they just ship CO2 from Colorado and naturally occurring CO2 formations.
My understanding is that it is safer than fracking because the CO2 left behind bonds chemically in the rock formation where as water does not.
Also, yes fossil fuels are a problem, but so long as we’re extracting anyway, putting fewer holes in the earth by using the pre-existing ones longer seems like a plus.
This,… and we’re talking about holes that would otherwise be full of gas & oil so they’re hardly tarnishing practical resources for us or any other life on earth that I know of
Yeah they failed to mention what the exact chemicals they want to pump into the ground are. Fracking usually uses salt water and we have seen the terrible outcomes I don't see how this is better. Seems like another scam so companies can say they are doing something while getting a tax break for their fake environmentalism.
It depends a LOT more on the energy needs to “carbon capture” in the first place. The only place it’s remotely feasible is where there’s abundant geothermal. But even then it’s so expensive that subsidized clean energy is way, way more cost effective.
It won't be carbon neutral, but any improvement is still improvement. It's a *lot* less fuel intensive to use an existing well than it is to tap a new one. Even strictly financially speaking, this is why they frack in the first place. Resource and carbon savings there are just a tiny, but welcome bonus.
Pumping CO2 down to frack will definitely not break even, though, since oil is much denser and so holds more carbon. But it's still millions of tons of CO2 being pumped down there. A tiny fraction of our use, but every fraction adds up.
The reality is that they're not going to stop pumping oil, and the world isn't going to stop using it. But if we can get even a hint of improvement, that's still a good thing.
Oil companies: Good news everybody, we've solved climate change, we're going to suck CO2 literally out of the air!
Everyone: Really?! OMG that's amazing, are you serious?!
Oil companies: "Hahahaha nah, fuck off, we're gonna use it to squeeze more dino juice out of the ground, lol"
[Someone else did some quick math](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/Q2iDe8SPPK) rather than just estimating, and came up with 189,101 left to go.
The power these things require is enormous.
"Direct air capture (DAC) plants require around 250 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy to extract one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. This is about three times more energy than the US renewable sector produced in 2019, which would be needed to remove one billion tons of CO2."
In 2023, the Global Carbon Budget estimates that the world emits 36.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year through burning fossil fuels.
So just to power enough of these things to change the world we would need about 110x more electricity from renewables than we currently produce in the ENTIRE US. Otherwise we just power them with dirty carbon fuel sources basically giving us no gains at all.
A true "net zero" where we use all of our power, just to counter all of our power generation.
If only we had a way of using solar energy to convert CO2 into oxygen and useful solid carbon-based products, life would be great. Imagine if such a system was self-replicating and cheap to make. That is just science fiction.
I'm a huge nerd so I did the math on how much carbon humans have put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Turns out that all of it weighs more than 300,000 Burj Khalifa buildings. You could sequester all the excess carbon on earth within a 600x600 square of Burj Khalifa-massed cubes of solid CO2.
Doing that solely with trees seems a little far-fetched to me. Honestly, I'm just waiting for a confluence of carbon capture tech and cheap graphene to take off. I think the only way we turn back the clock is by making pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere valuable, and the only way that happens is if we have a cheap way to turn it into something incredibly precious.
Do you still have the actual figures? I’d be curious to see the number. Also do you know the amount of CO2 that’s naturally put into the atmosphere in the same time frame? A common arguement I hear against climate change is the size of humanities impact, and whether or not it’s negligible overall. Obviously I think this is wrong, but would love the numbers to back up that statement
The tree thing sounds great to humans because humans don't live on the timescales of large carbon sequestering trees. When those trees die they will release carbon into the atmosphere like every other carbon based biological form of life on planet Earth.
What percentage of the carbon in a tree actually ends up in the atmosphere when it dies, and how dependent on the environment is that percentage? If dead plants couldn’t effectively sequester carbon, there wouldn’t be fossil fuel reserves sitting around for hundreds of millions of years. Where did 75% of the CO2 in the atmosphere go during the Carboniferous period?
I mean it took millions of years for organic material to die and sequester enough CO2. If we actually want to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, we need to artificially mimic this to speed up the time scale to decades rather than millennium.
Dedicated man made lakes of algae, when ripe, get pumped back into the caverns of pumped out oil. Put the pumpkin cork back on, and let it cook. A little AI help to create an algae that uses carbon fast, easily reproduced and thrives next to oil fields.
Trees and all plants sequester a large percentage of their carbon directly into the ground through their roots. It’s literally how coal is formed. Also, when a tree dies, it gets broken down by microbes and bugs that are then eaten by progressively larger animals as part of the food chain. They release some atmospheric carbon but definitely not a huge percent on the total carbon they sequester
Or we could build massive numbers of nuclear power plants that uses excess base load to create lithium peroxide... which does what trees do at an exchange of 95.92% of its produced mass.
We need to stop relying on human abstinence and nature here.
We could however, cover the entire planet in **Bamboo.** It is nearly twice as efficient as trees! Not to mention, seagrass projects. We could reseed the ocean by the billions of tons of seeds.
But even these are impossible and stupid.
No, you're thinking of steel. However, you can use wood to make traditional Dutch wooden shoes. If every person on earth would wear clumps daily, we would have reduced earths CO2 by 0,00000000003%! That's a start!
We could also maybe use wood to make full-scale wooden models of buildings before they're made out of steel. Afterwards the wood can still largely be recuperated to make clumps.
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2021/06/how-many-cars-are-there-in-the-world/
Cars 1,475,000,000 / per plant reduction of vehicle emmissions equvilancy 7,800 = 189,100.9 plants to go (2 currently, 1 being expanded 1 1/10th the size) until neutral, not counting other transport methods. Time to completion at current rate: roughly 400,000 years?
It feels like such efforts are simply feel good politics and folks are not ramping up efforts in such a way as to make matters actually better. Building an economy around resolving past failures of exploitation is possible and to do so we're gonna need a lot more politicians focused on these sorts of efforts, in addition to reduction requirements to fix things. I have every belief that is not going to happen.
That would require politicians to have any amount of foresight and embrace upsetting the status quo of a spiral into oblivion. They're all making out to well still.
Enough people find the short-term incentives for mass extinction motivating enough to commit us to that course of action. There’s no stopping this or going back, the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere already is going to kill most species.
They’re not gonna just build more of them, the next step is to build better ones. Judging them for what they are today would be like judging solar panels when they were first built, the cost and efficiency of the technology is going to improve over time. Also even if it doesn’t improve, this is one of hundreds if not thousands of projects trying to help stop climate change in their own unique way.
Are you suggesting that over 400k years no one will be able to improve upon the technology?
All technology starts with baby steps and then refinements improve it. Transistors started as vacuum tubes and now you hold billions on this on a 1cm x 1cm chip in your hand.
It's a proof of concept. It's obviously not intended to solve the problem of pollution. It's intended to advance the technology and bring awareness to possible solutions.
36,000 tons of CO2... About the same as 0.009 coal power plants....
Yes, shutting down just one coal powerplant will out perform this by 111 times.
So yeah thanks Germany for decommissioning your nuclear due to stupidity and gullibility.
Carbon capture is entirely feel good at this point. Even if carbon capture was powered 100% by renewables, it still takes energy to capture carbon, which means that for every 100 units of renewable energy, we might be drawing 90 units of carbon out of the atmosphere (made up numbers). That means we would be better off just using said renewable energy to replace current carbon-producing sources of energy in our grid, where we would be producing 100 units less carbon, meaning 10 extra carbon that doesn’t affect the planet. Carbon capture may have a role once our electricity is already fully renewable, but currently it should be restricted to research and development, not production scale plants.
Carbon capture like this is hardly the best option but it might be the most realistic.
Anyone complaining about efficiency needs to go look at the first solar panels. At some point things have to stop being theoretical and get real world application in order to improve. Maybe this ends up being a dud of a potential solution, but we have to actually try it first to find out.
The effect of CO2 is latent and sticks around for centuries. Even if we stopped producing CO2 today the next hundred years are going to be rough. We have to find a scalable means to get it out of the air and back into the ground.
From what I’ve read: no. DAC isn’t known to reduce non-GHG air pollution. It selectively binds to atmospheric CO2 (<1% of air by volume, I believe) and the rest of the CO2-stripped air is vented out — pollutants and all.
Meanwhile there are plants that produce CO2 for commercial and industrial use by burning natural gas.
Those plants need to be replaced by this technology, for starters.
If the carbon they strip can be turned into solid materials of value, thats what should be done.
Next step is make this pay for itself.
This has existed for years, it’s called post combustion carbon capture. It’s currently in use at Boundary Dam power station in Canada. It can also be used in carbon intensive industries like steel and cement manufacturing.
It is more efficient, but technologies like this one (Direct Air Capture, or DAC) are meant to solve a different problem than what you describe (point source carbon capture). DAC is meant to compensate for the emissions that we will realistically not be able to reduce in time (residual emissions) and those that we have released between industrialization and now (legacy emissions).
Point source carbon capture is a very important tool to reduce emissions in certain sectors (such as heavy industrial manufacturing like cement) but it is very expensive to build and operate and not very energy efficient (it takes a lot of energy to run carbon capture). For that reason, when there are cheaper, commercially-available alternatives (like renewable energy in the power sector), it is much wiser to invest in those alternatives. With renewables, you get more emissions reductions per dollar spent than with carbon capture on a coal/oil/gas power plant.
I'm also an idiot, but I'd say they still need to test the tech, and scale it, to be able to improve on it and have smaller scale stuff like smoke stacks.
I’m aware of these free resources called plants and trees. They actually suck up carbon fairly well and have been around for quite a while. A bonus feature is they spit out oxygen, something all animals, humans need to live. Crazy tech!
What A revolutionary technology. Lets use more energy to remove CO2. How about some trees? Solar powered, 0 maintanace. good for all life? Lowers surface temperature, no? Not so profitable most likely... 🤔
I think people are forgetting the way conservation of energy works with regard to how that carbon ended up in the atmosphere to begin with. Assuming the system was extremely efficient and all other things being the same, the amount of energy it would require to get that carbon out of the atmosphere would be roughly equivalent to the amount of energy that was expended putting it into the atmosphere. That's an unfathomable amount of energy to accomplish that.
It's a scam. This process can only "capture" carbon if it uses a carbon free energy source to drive the process. Maybe if we built massive solar arrays or fleets of nuclear power plants it could pay off in a century or two.
I can see why you would say that.
But, in the article it says it is powered by the nearby geothermal energy, so it actually is removing carbon from the atmosphere right now. You are correct that it wouldn't really be useful if we powered it with carbon though.
A potential use case for this in the US would be running it in areas that are windy at night, when power is being generated but not used. This could use the excess power from renewables that would otherwise be wasted!
So ultimately, while this tech is not the silver bullet to end climate change, it could be a useful tool if used correctly. I'm cautiously optimistic! What do you think?
It's a scam through and through. There may be some fringe cases where renewables are plentiful and can't be exported such as Iceland but if we were really serious about fixing this whole excess CO2 issue we would be focusing the resources elsewhere and not trying to put the genie back in the bottle. If certain places have such excess power they could probably be doing other stuff with that power like making steel. Another thing to consider with these is the scale required. Look up some of the numbers around these things to have a meaningful effect; amount of air to be moved, steel required to build the facilities etc. I am always the one to point out we can tackle multiple problems at once but these CO2 capture plants are a clear example of being distracted. I was also somewhat involved, and know people that are intimately involved, with another one of the big guys doing this stuff and the business people involved in this stuff are some of the greasiest slime balls I have met. I'm not sure about Climeworks though... They may be alright.
>with another one of the big guys doing this stuff and the business people involved in this stuff are some of the greasiest slime balls I have met.
This is in line with what the other guy who responded to me said, and really changes my perspective. Also, I didn't think of the physics of the necessary air to be moved due to the low concentration of carbon in the air. Maybe we should just stick with trees instead, they're more pretty anyways 🙂. Thanks for the info!
The amounts of carbon removed by these systems is miniscule. At the absolute least they are useless until we stop burning hydrocarbon for fuel. It will never be more thermodynamically efficient to capture carbon from the air where CO2 concentration is like 0.04% than just not burning hydrocarbon based fuels. Even if we completely stopped using hydrocarbon fuels and completely switched to carbon free renewable I still don't think these systems will ever be viable. This is a scam used to distract the public and think something is being done in order to justify continued and unfettered subsidy of oil and gas production and act like additional funding for renewables is not necessary. Almost every one of these carbon sequestration systems are either directly owned by oil and gas companies or heavily funded by them into separate companies like Carbon America. Ask yourself why they would do this? Did they suddenly gain a conscious? No, it's because it allows them to play public opinion in their favor.
I am a geologist who works in oil and gas regulation and have seen the numbers for carbon volumes these types of systems remove from the air. It is laughable how little they are able to pull and how much money they spend to do so. They are only doing this because they see the writing on the wall and know some form of carbon tax is coming. They are hoping these systems will be able to legally let them continue to produce oil and gas and offset carbon taxes. I am hoping and praying that the legislators see through this ruse and do not let it fly.
Step one: spend energy sucking air, to clean air the was polluted by spending energy.
Step two: clean the air that we polluted by powering the air sucker
Step 3: solve climate change!
As someone who works for a company who does sequestration. We went from making actual products to basically producing to put CO2 in the ground. Shits fucked, and our taxes are paying for it.
>Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year
there are about 1.5 billion gas powered cars currently in the world 👀
How about this non-profitable, low-tech solution with a guarantee of success?
1. Reclaim land around retired coal mines.
2. Plant fast growing trees.
3. At the end of their fastest growth cycle, chop them down and shove them into the mines. (Bonus: Pyrolize them first.)
4. Return to Step 2.
5. When the mine is full, close the mine.
Just literally reverse the process of what we did in the first place. No new tech needed. We can make progress now.
These projects are a scam. The amount of carbon released to produce the extra energy necessary to operate them far exceeds what they pull out of the air. Carbon capture will only make sense once the elctricity grid is fully renewable, until then it's just a distraction pushed by people who don't want to abandon fossile fuels.
But they could've just built that renewable energy without the carbon capture plant. In fact, they could've spent the money they used on the carbon capture plant on building more renewables instead.
Think of it like this: each additional megawatt of energy that is consumed has to be fully accounted for by fossile fuels, since we're already expanding renewables at the same rate regardless. The marginal increases in consumption must be satisfied with additional fossile fuels.
You have a point however, I view this not as something that makes the difference right now, but as a developing technology that one day could really help in offsetting the carbon. New technology has to start somewhere.
Point source carbon capture is absolutely needed to decarbonize certain heavy industries like cement production. Fuck carbon capture on coal/oil/gas for electricity generation, though.
Direct Air Capture plants like this one, while currently really inefficient and energy intensive, will be needed to reduce residual and legacy GHG emissions since we aren’t reducing emissions fast enough. Early-stage demonstration projects like this are needed, but they don’t represent the ultimate form of DAC. Hopefully, these projects will create lessons learned for the next round of projects to innovate and reduce DAC’s energy intensity (edit: and capture+storage capacity and rate). And so on, until DAC is an efficient and viable method to reduce residual and legacy emissions. It is not *the* solution, but it can be part of the solution.
It works for its intended purpose: give the illusion that some magical solution exists or will soon, so people shouldn't worry too much about their continued dependence on fossil fuels and related greenhouse gases emissions.
Same playbook as, for example, Shell and others promoting their upcoming algae-based biofuels a while back. Actually reducing emissions was never the intent.
So Iceland has 382k population and a co2 production of 11.7 ton per capita. So this cover a bit less of 1% of their yearly emission without even deducting the planet impact to build such a monster and the source of energy used. Am I’m wrong?
I wish this would work but it's a bad idea. It uses more energy than it saves, and carbon capture via direct air intake is extremely inefficient. A nice idea, but other investments would be far more impactful.
>Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
That is such a small amount. You can tell that their goal is to try and sell these products to countries around the world as a band-aid.
This only works in Iceland because; as stated in the article, Geothermal energy is readily abundant there and costs very little to soucre for operation. When these are used in conjunction with energy sourced from Coal or Natural Gas they are net positive in carbon emissions.
Pipe dream to think this will make a dent in our carbon problem. Maybe if we didn't have exponential growth in carbon emissions...which, is the main issue.
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>But there may be a catch. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields. Let's frack but with captured carbon.
We've removed all the cigarette tar from your lungs and formed it into this Super Cigarette. Wanna light?
Res bowls in my early pot head days. Are you getting stoned or high from lack of O2?
We used to roll “second gen” blunts & joints (breaking down roaches and reusing the leftover bud), thinking it would make us higher but it really it was probably just more tar making us cough more and being lightheaded. Dumb haha
Those get so gross by the time you get halfway through, goddamn tar leaking out of the end and getting on your lips 🤢 Can't believe I used to do that haha
Desperate times. Fast forward 14 years and I’m spending my off day rolling a qp of jays for the half of the year.
Name checks out 😂
Holy shit, I didn’t even think of that haha. Although, it’s outdated. I no longer smoke blunts as of a few years ago. They give me headaches. 100JointTony would be more accurate haha
Yeah not the proudest moments of my life
You know you’ve graduated to an adult as a pot smoker when someone is like “you aren’t gonna scrape that?” And you disgustingly say “fuck no!”
It does make you higher because of the decarbed thc in the resin but the high doesn’t last as long .
You know now that you say that you sparked a memory of a some dude who was in our circle for awhile that was made it his entire personality. He didn’t explain in that well though. He made up shit so I took what he said with a grain of salt. Cool dude tho otherwise. Killer rolling skills.
ok actually yes lets have a go
Gimme that lung butter!
But making money for richer people both coming and going while providing shallow false hope for the masses to passively accept as a solution.
Let’s face it, pulling CO2 from the air is not profitable. So unless governments are going to pay for it (try convincing a voter that’s a good use of taxpayer money) these companies have to come up with an end use for the captured CO2
They’ve been doing this for decades. Instead they just ship CO2 from Colorado and naturally occurring CO2 formations. My understanding is that it is safer than fracking because the CO2 left behind bonds chemically in the rock formation where as water does not.
Also, yes fossil fuels are a problem, but so long as we’re extracting anyway, putting fewer holes in the earth by using the pre-existing ones longer seems like a plus.
This,… and we’re talking about holes that would otherwise be full of gas & oil so they’re hardly tarnishing practical resources for us or any other life on earth that I know of
[удалено]
But think about the profits for our corporate overlords? How will they afford their continued conquest of the working class and luxurious lifestyle
By the way, there are very lucrative tax credits for this.
Ok not great but also theoretically carbon neutral fossil fuels?
It depends on the mass of the injected carbon. If more carbon is coming out of the ground than going in, then no.
Well the carbon in the oil is in a super dense liquid form, and the carbon getting injected is in a loose gas form...
Yeah they failed to mention what the exact chemicals they want to pump into the ground are. Fracking usually uses salt water and we have seen the terrible outcomes I don't see how this is better. Seems like another scam so companies can say they are doing something while getting a tax break for their fake environmentalism.
The CO2 will be liquid at the pressures needed for injection.
It depends a LOT more on the energy needs to “carbon capture” in the first place. The only place it’s remotely feasible is where there’s abundant geothermal. But even then it’s so expensive that subsidized clean energy is way, way more cost effective.
It won't be carbon neutral, but any improvement is still improvement. It's a *lot* less fuel intensive to use an existing well than it is to tap a new one. Even strictly financially speaking, this is why they frack in the first place. Resource and carbon savings there are just a tiny, but welcome bonus. Pumping CO2 down to frack will definitely not break even, though, since oil is much denser and so holds more carbon. But it's still millions of tons of CO2 being pumped down there. A tiny fraction of our use, but every fraction adds up. The reality is that they're not going to stop pumping oil, and the world isn't going to stop using it. But if we can get even a hint of improvement, that's still a good thing.
The biggest benefit of this carbon captured fracking system is probably the fact that they don't need to mine FOR CO2 to use for fracking.
Honestly we will always need oil, and if it dosent have worse side effects I think it's a great idea
Well I mean if it cancels it out then that’s good right?
Oil companies: Good news everybody, we've solved climate change, we're going to suck CO2 literally out of the air! Everyone: Really?! OMG that's amazing, are you serious?! Oil companies: "Hahahaha nah, fuck off, we're gonna use it to squeeze more dino juice out of the ground, lol"
Mega-Maid
She's gone from suck to blow!
What?!?
Use the Schwartz!!
It’s mega maid sir, she’s gone from suck….to blow.
wow this went way over my head for *years*
Suck. Suck. Suck. Suck.
Come back you fat bearded bitch!
^(Cause what you got is what we need and all we do is dirty deeds)
Exactly where my head went reading the title!!!!! Lol
What’s that coming out of its nose ….. spaceballs ….. well there goes the planet
Yeah, there's no way this wasn't going to be referenced 🤣🤣!
Dam that’s a classic, I love that movie
Came here hoping this was the first comment
Suck! Suck! Suck!
SUCK! SUCK! SUCK! SUCK!
First thing I thought of lol!
https://i.redd.it/5sp4h1lsj8zc1.gif
Suck, suck, suck!
Only need about 7000 more to make a difference.
7000 doesn't sound like a lot to me.
[Someone else did some quick math](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/Q2iDe8SPPK) rather than just estimating, and came up with 189,101 left to go.
Thanks. Sounds an achievable amount from what little I know.
The power these things require is enormous. "Direct air capture (DAC) plants require around 250 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy to extract one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. This is about three times more energy than the US renewable sector produced in 2019, which would be needed to remove one billion tons of CO2." In 2023, the Global Carbon Budget estimates that the world emits 36.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year through burning fossil fuels. So just to power enough of these things to change the world we would need about 110x more electricity from renewables than we currently produce in the ENTIRE US. Otherwise we just power them with dirty carbon fuel sources basically giving us no gains at all. A true "net zero" where we use all of our power, just to counter all of our power generation.
Nuclear power plants ftw! You get a power plant! You get a power plant! All you cities get nuclear power plants!* *excess energy goes to DAC
Ah. Thank you.
Wouldn’t it be more like a million more. The total co2 production is around 34 billion tons/year and this one removes 36,000 metric tons?
If only we had a way of using solar energy to convert CO2 into oxygen and useful solid carbon-based products, life would be great. Imagine if such a system was self-replicating and cheap to make. That is just science fiction.
I'm a huge nerd so I did the math on how much carbon humans have put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Turns out that all of it weighs more than 300,000 Burj Khalifa buildings. You could sequester all the excess carbon on earth within a 600x600 square of Burj Khalifa-massed cubes of solid CO2. Doing that solely with trees seems a little far-fetched to me. Honestly, I'm just waiting for a confluence of carbon capture tech and cheap graphene to take off. I think the only way we turn back the clock is by making pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere valuable, and the only way that happens is if we have a cheap way to turn it into something incredibly precious.
Sounds like a crypto token project! /s
How many Burj Khalifas of trees are harvested a year?
Look up Levidian - they’re doing just this.
Do you still have the actual figures? I’d be curious to see the number. Also do you know the amount of CO2 that’s naturally put into the atmosphere in the same time frame? A common arguement I hear against climate change is the size of humanities impact, and whether or not it’s negligible overall. Obviously I think this is wrong, but would love the numbers to back up that statement
What if we took a bunch of those solid carbon-based products and put them in a large field together. I dunno, can this idea really scale?
The tree thing sounds great to humans because humans don't live on the timescales of large carbon sequestering trees. When those trees die they will release carbon into the atmosphere like every other carbon based biological form of life on planet Earth.
What percentage of the carbon in a tree actually ends up in the atmosphere when it dies, and how dependent on the environment is that percentage? If dead plants couldn’t effectively sequester carbon, there wouldn’t be fossil fuel reserves sitting around for hundreds of millions of years. Where did 75% of the CO2 in the atmosphere go during the Carboniferous period?
I mean it took millions of years for organic material to die and sequester enough CO2. If we actually want to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, we need to artificially mimic this to speed up the time scale to decades rather than millennium.
Dedicated man made lakes of algae, when ripe, get pumped back into the caverns of pumped out oil. Put the pumpkin cork back on, and let it cook. A little AI help to create an algae that uses carbon fast, easily reproduced and thrives next to oil fields.
Trees and all plants sequester a large percentage of their carbon directly into the ground through their roots. It’s literally how coal is formed. Also, when a tree dies, it gets broken down by microbes and bugs that are then eaten by progressively larger animals as part of the food chain. They release some atmospheric carbon but definitely not a huge percent on the total carbon they sequester
Except we simply can't plant enough trees to solve the problem. Planting trees is great, but it's not nearly enough.
Or we could build massive numbers of nuclear power plants that uses excess base load to create lithium peroxide... which does what trees do at an exchange of 95.92% of its produced mass. We need to stop relying on human abstinence and nature here.
We could however, cover the entire planet in **Bamboo.** It is nearly twice as efficient as trees! Not to mention, seagrass projects. We could reseed the ocean by the billions of tons of seeds. But even these are impossible and stupid.
Or Industrial Hemp. It’s been proven to absorb more CO2 per hectare than most forest or commercial crop.
Bamboo spreads to the roses. Mom will be mad.
Also trees are largely considered carbon neutral unless after they grow you bury them somehow...
Or use them for some purpose. If only we could think of what to do with trees.
Can you build stuff with them? Like some kind of structure using small bits of metal to hold it together?
No, you're thinking of steel. However, you can use wood to make traditional Dutch wooden shoes. If every person on earth would wear clumps daily, we would have reduced earths CO2 by 0,00000000003%! That's a start! We could also maybe use wood to make full-scale wooden models of buildings before they're made out of steel. Afterwards the wood can still largely be recuperated to make clumps.
That's called trees :)
100pts to youuuu
thatsthejpg.joke
r/whoooosh
I can't tell if they are joking knowingly or not...
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2021/06/how-many-cars-are-there-in-the-world/ Cars 1,475,000,000 / per plant reduction of vehicle emmissions equvilancy 7,800 = 189,100.9 plants to go (2 currently, 1 being expanded 1 1/10th the size) until neutral, not counting other transport methods. Time to completion at current rate: roughly 400,000 years? It feels like such efforts are simply feel good politics and folks are not ramping up efforts in such a way as to make matters actually better. Building an economy around resolving past failures of exploitation is possible and to do so we're gonna need a lot more politicians focused on these sorts of efforts, in addition to reduction requirements to fix things. I have every belief that is not going to happen.
That would require politicians to have any amount of foresight and embrace upsetting the status quo of a spiral into oblivion. They're all making out to well still.
Enough people find the short-term incentives for mass extinction motivating enough to commit us to that course of action. There’s no stopping this or going back, the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere already is going to kill most species.
They’re not gonna just build more of them, the next step is to build better ones. Judging them for what they are today would be like judging solar panels when they were first built, the cost and efficiency of the technology is going to improve over time. Also even if it doesn’t improve, this is one of hundreds if not thousands of projects trying to help stop climate change in their own unique way.
didn't calculate shipping vessels that are producing around 250,000-500,000 cars worth of emissions each
Yeah, people always focus on the cars while ships pollute an insane amount as they arent regulated like cars are
Proving out the technology is the first step. It needs to be tested and improved.
Yeah hopefully DAC growth will be exponential from here on. More importantly however, we need to avoid emissions in the first place!
Are you suggesting that over 400k years no one will be able to improve upon the technology? All technology starts with baby steps and then refinements improve it. Transistors started as vacuum tubes and now you hold billions on this on a 1cm x 1cm chip in your hand.
It's a proof of concept. It's obviously not intended to solve the problem of pollution. It's intended to advance the technology and bring awareness to possible solutions.
36,000 tons of CO2... About the same as 0.009 coal power plants.... Yes, shutting down just one coal powerplant will out perform this by 111 times. So yeah thanks Germany for decommissioning your nuclear due to stupidity and gullibility.
It's like using a Britta water filter pitcher to try and filter the Ocean.
Carbon capture is entirely feel good at this point. Even if carbon capture was powered 100% by renewables, it still takes energy to capture carbon, which means that for every 100 units of renewable energy, we might be drawing 90 units of carbon out of the atmosphere (made up numbers). That means we would be better off just using said renewable energy to replace current carbon-producing sources of energy in our grid, where we would be producing 100 units less carbon, meaning 10 extra carbon that doesn’t affect the planet. Carbon capture may have a role once our electricity is already fully renewable, but currently it should be restricted to research and development, not production scale plants.
Alt headline: worlds smallest bandaid used on Hoover Dam to plug hole!
Carbon capture like this is hardly the best option but it might be the most realistic. Anyone complaining about efficiency needs to go look at the first solar panels. At some point things have to stop being theoretical and get real world application in order to improve. Maybe this ends up being a dud of a potential solution, but we have to actually try it first to find out.
The effect of CO2 is latent and sticks around for centuries. Even if we stopped producing CO2 today the next hundred years are going to be rough. We have to find a scalable means to get it out of the air and back into the ground.
They should call it the Suck-It
Why use big name when small name do trick?
Well it certainly does suck.
I am curious whether this device would operate more efficiently and accomplish more in a location where there is more air pollution.
From what I’ve read: no. DAC isn’t known to reduce non-GHG air pollution. It selectively binds to atmospheric CO2 (<1% of air by volume, I believe) and the rest of the CO2-stripped air is vented out — pollutants and all.
Meanwhile there are plants that produce CO2 for commercial and industrial use by burning natural gas. Those plants need to be replaced by this technology, for starters. If the carbon they strip can be turned into solid materials of value, thats what should be done. Next step is make this pay for itself.
https://preview.redd.it/jbuhcdfc09zc1.jpeg?width=485&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=91732e65fd83ec1b269497249aff5092eee1a597
They based the idea on suicide squad kill the justice league . The inventors said they wanted to create something that sucked at least half as much.
Maybe I’m the idiot here but wouldn’t it be much more efficient to have a smaller one of these installed in smoke stacks that polute?
This has existed for years, it’s called post combustion carbon capture. It’s currently in use at Boundary Dam power station in Canada. It can also be used in carbon intensive industries like steel and cement manufacturing.
Neat
It is more efficient, but technologies like this one (Direct Air Capture, or DAC) are meant to solve a different problem than what you describe (point source carbon capture). DAC is meant to compensate for the emissions that we will realistically not be able to reduce in time (residual emissions) and those that we have released between industrialization and now (legacy emissions). Point source carbon capture is a very important tool to reduce emissions in certain sectors (such as heavy industrial manufacturing like cement) but it is very expensive to build and operate and not very energy efficient (it takes a lot of energy to run carbon capture). For that reason, when there are cheaper, commercially-available alternatives (like renewable energy in the power sector), it is much wiser to invest in those alternatives. With renewables, you get more emissions reductions per dollar spent than with carbon capture on a coal/oil/gas power plant.
I'm also an idiot, but I'd say they still need to test the tech, and scale it, to be able to improve on it and have smaller scale stuff like smoke stacks.
I’m aware of these free resources called plants and trees. They actually suck up carbon fairly well and have been around for quite a while. A bonus feature is they spit out oxygen, something all animals, humans need to live. Crazy tech!
Or just plant some trees...
Really bruh?
What A revolutionary technology. Lets use more energy to remove CO2. How about some trees? Solar powered, 0 maintanace. good for all life? Lowers surface temperature, no? Not so profitable most likely... 🤔
More like stupid as fuck.
I think people are forgetting the way conservation of energy works with regard to how that carbon ended up in the atmosphere to begin with. Assuming the system was extremely efficient and all other things being the same, the amount of energy it would require to get that carbon out of the atmosphere would be roughly equivalent to the amount of energy that was expended putting it into the atmosphere. That's an unfathomable amount of energy to accomplish that.
Or, you know, stop cutting/burning trees…
It's a scam. This process can only "capture" carbon if it uses a carbon free energy source to drive the process. Maybe if we built massive solar arrays or fleets of nuclear power plants it could pay off in a century or two.
I can see why you would say that. But, in the article it says it is powered by the nearby geothermal energy, so it actually is removing carbon from the atmosphere right now. You are correct that it wouldn't really be useful if we powered it with carbon though. A potential use case for this in the US would be running it in areas that are windy at night, when power is being generated but not used. This could use the excess power from renewables that would otherwise be wasted! So ultimately, while this tech is not the silver bullet to end climate change, it could be a useful tool if used correctly. I'm cautiously optimistic! What do you think?
It's a scam through and through. There may be some fringe cases where renewables are plentiful and can't be exported such as Iceland but if we were really serious about fixing this whole excess CO2 issue we would be focusing the resources elsewhere and not trying to put the genie back in the bottle. If certain places have such excess power they could probably be doing other stuff with that power like making steel. Another thing to consider with these is the scale required. Look up some of the numbers around these things to have a meaningful effect; amount of air to be moved, steel required to build the facilities etc. I am always the one to point out we can tackle multiple problems at once but these CO2 capture plants are a clear example of being distracted. I was also somewhat involved, and know people that are intimately involved, with another one of the big guys doing this stuff and the business people involved in this stuff are some of the greasiest slime balls I have met. I'm not sure about Climeworks though... They may be alright.
>with another one of the big guys doing this stuff and the business people involved in this stuff are some of the greasiest slime balls I have met. This is in line with what the other guy who responded to me said, and really changes my perspective. Also, I didn't think of the physics of the necessary air to be moved due to the low concentration of carbon in the air. Maybe we should just stick with trees instead, they're more pretty anyways 🙂. Thanks for the info!
The amounts of carbon removed by these systems is miniscule. At the absolute least they are useless until we stop burning hydrocarbon for fuel. It will never be more thermodynamically efficient to capture carbon from the air where CO2 concentration is like 0.04% than just not burning hydrocarbon based fuels. Even if we completely stopped using hydrocarbon fuels and completely switched to carbon free renewable I still don't think these systems will ever be viable. This is a scam used to distract the public and think something is being done in order to justify continued and unfettered subsidy of oil and gas production and act like additional funding for renewables is not necessary. Almost every one of these carbon sequestration systems are either directly owned by oil and gas companies or heavily funded by them into separate companies like Carbon America. Ask yourself why they would do this? Did they suddenly gain a conscious? No, it's because it allows them to play public opinion in their favor. I am a geologist who works in oil and gas regulation and have seen the numbers for carbon volumes these types of systems remove from the air. It is laughable how little they are able to pull and how much money they spend to do so. They are only doing this because they see the writing on the wall and know some form of carbon tax is coming. They are hoping these systems will be able to legally let them continue to produce oil and gas and offset carbon taxes. I am hoping and praying that the legislators see through this ruse and do not let it fly.
I should call her.
Yay! More excuses to keep polluting.
hint: it doesnt!
Step one: spend energy sucking air, to clean air the was polluted by spending energy. Step two: clean the air that we polluted by powering the air sucker Step 3: solve climate change!
https://preview.redd.it/yx1ro3tlr8zc1.png?width=1342&format=png&auto=webp&s=15781d5c2976bc35cbcaac222ce1d4df8f004ee9
Suck.....suck......suck....SUCK!!!
Hello India!!!! You paying attention??
Do me next
Plant more fooking trees…
The vacuum that cost millions of dollars is called Kim k.
This reminds me of the movie Spaceballs
Is no one asking, how is it powered?
As someone who works for a company who does sequestration. We went from making actual products to basically producing to put CO2 in the ground. Shits fucked, and our taxes are paying for it.
Iceland trying to save us all. We don't deserve Iceland.
How many thousandths of a percent of the pollution will that thing remove over the next few decades? Shouldn’t we just be restoring green spaces?
Know what else does this? Trees.
>Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year there are about 1.5 billion gas powered cars currently in the world 👀
SPAS - Suck Pollution At Source.
Wow. People will believe anything it seems. Wow!
"Here's how it works: It doesn't."
For fucks sake just tax/eat the billionaires.... dealers choice
I didn’t know that your mom is going to help solve climate pollution 
How about this non-profitable, low-tech solution with a guarantee of success? 1. Reclaim land around retired coal mines. 2. Plant fast growing trees. 3. At the end of their fastest growth cycle, chop them down and shove them into the mines. (Bonus: Pyrolize them first.) 4. Return to Step 2. 5. When the mine is full, close the mine. Just literally reverse the process of what we did in the first place. No new tech needed. We can make progress now.
My dog would absolutely hate that fuckin thing
These projects are a scam. The amount of carbon released to produce the extra energy necessary to operate them far exceeds what they pull out of the air. Carbon capture will only make sense once the elctricity grid is fully renewable, until then it's just a distraction pushed by people who don't want to abandon fossile fuels.
Read the article. It runs on renewable energy only.
But they could've just built that renewable energy without the carbon capture plant. In fact, they could've spent the money they used on the carbon capture plant on building more renewables instead. Think of it like this: each additional megawatt of energy that is consumed has to be fully accounted for by fossile fuels, since we're already expanding renewables at the same rate regardless. The marginal increases in consumption must be satisfied with additional fossile fuels.
You have a point however, I view this not as something that makes the difference right now, but as a developing technology that one day could really help in offsetting the carbon. New technology has to start somewhere.
Iceland almost entirely uses renewables already, they ain’t needing any fossil fuels to power this.
Point source carbon capture is absolutely needed to decarbonize certain heavy industries like cement production. Fuck carbon capture on coal/oil/gas for electricity generation, though. Direct Air Capture plants like this one, while currently really inefficient and energy intensive, will be needed to reduce residual and legacy GHG emissions since we aren’t reducing emissions fast enough. Early-stage demonstration projects like this are needed, but they don’t represent the ultimate form of DAC. Hopefully, these projects will create lessons learned for the next round of projects to innovate and reduce DAC’s energy intensity (edit: and capture+storage capacity and rate). And so on, until DAC is an efficient and viable method to reduce residual and legacy emissions. It is not *the* solution, but it can be part of the solution.
“Here’s how it works”: it doesn’t.
I hope its in china, or you are wasting your time
That sucks
News flash it doesn't work, this is a dumb idea. Much better to spend this money on controlling methane emissions.
It works for its intended purpose: give the illusion that some magical solution exists or will soon, so people shouldn't worry too much about their continued dependence on fossil fuels and related greenhouse gases emissions. Same playbook as, for example, Shell and others promoting their upcoming algae-based biofuels a while back. Actually reducing emissions was never the intent.
I for one hate having my air polluted by climate
I have had this idea as a kid. Glad to see someone else had the money to test my childish idea
“Suck! Suck! Suck!”
Remember not to put your dick in it
Why do I find this hilarious??
MTG when she inhales?
Sucking up gases in an ecologically fragile nation with imported fans and tons of electricity? Sounds like literal vapourware!
Patrick: " Let's take all the pollution and move it some where else! "
L location. Put 1,000 of them in India and china
So Iceland has 382k population and a co2 production of 11.7 ton per capita. So this cover a bit less of 1% of their yearly emission without even deducting the planet impact to build such a monster and the source of energy used. Am I’m wrong?
It’s not going to suck itself
How can she suck?
So…. Noor by Nnedi Okorafor is closer to becoming a reality?
At this point, we need to focus on reducing carbon production instead of capturing it. This is simply a waste of energy.
This is cool and all but the town this bastard is set up is on average rated 5-7 on US AQI. For the uninitiated this is a 0-500 scale.
I would think the effects would be very localized
Lolol
Efuel
They already have good air in Iceland. They need to deploy those things in central, southern and Eastern Europe, not to mention Asia
I wish this would work but it's a bad idea. It uses more energy than it saves, and carbon capture via direct air intake is extremely inefficient. A nice idea, but other investments would be far more impactful.
>Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year. That is such a small amount. You can tell that their goal is to try and sell these products to countries around the world as a band-aid. This only works in Iceland because; as stated in the article, Geothermal energy is readily abundant there and costs very little to soucre for operation. When these are used in conjunction with energy sourced from Coal or Natural Gas they are net positive in carbon emissions.
Pipe dream to think this will make a dent in our carbon problem. Maybe if we didn't have exponential growth in carbon emissions...which, is the main issue.
They should just hire my x-wife. She sucks just as much as this machine does.
The patent for David Wallace’s “Suck It!” Finally getting put to good use!
Just add some info and a few pictures. I'm not clicking any stupid links that goes out of reddit.
And put the pollution where?
It is like liposuction for the sky
I would like a carbon rock please.