Carbon capture is not for what people think it is. It is for enhanced oil recovery.<p>Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: <a href="https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-capture-and-storage/" rel="nofollow">https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...</a><p>While renewables capture an inexhaustible source of energy (Sun), fossil fuels rely on an inexhaustible source of money for them: subsidies. Fossil fuel companies can't survive without the hundreds of billions of subsidies every year[1]. They can capture more subsides for 'carbon capture', using the captured carbon to extract more oil.<p>Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil: <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denbury" rel="nofollow">https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...</a><p>[1]Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: <a href="https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022" rel="nofollow">https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022</a>
Cool, but carbon capture from the air is at best a tiny fraction of the solutions we need. Right now our time is better spent on emissions reduction.<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x</a>
Really surprised to see so much cynicism about this. Discovering a chemical which can facilitate the reversal of climate change is vastly more useful than almost everything else those supercomputers would’ve been used for.
This is about developing metal-organic materials that absorb CO2 under one set of conditions and release it under a different set of conditions. The whole goal here is to generate a stream of 100% pure CO2 starting with ~400 ppm CO2 - meaning if you want 1 liter of pure CO2 at room temperature and pressure, you need to process a minimum of 2500 liters of air - and likely quite a bit more as you are not going to be 100% efficient.<p>Making this work is all about minimizing the energy (and thus economic) cost of this first step. Then you need to reduce (add hydrogen and remove oxygen) the CO2 and start building other products - methanol, long-chain hydrocarbons, etc. (that's shipping and jet/rocket fuel, respectively). But why stop there? If you want long-term stable materials, converting the CO2 into carbon fiber is a good option - more sci-fi is a diamond endpoint, which takes a lot of energy, but has many uses.<p>This will have minimal effect on atmospheric CO2 unless fossil fuel extraction and combustion is eliminated from the energy mix - but it does point to how human civilization can do material and fuel production without having to mine carbon from the earth or cut down forests. In the long run, this is the only plausible option.
comments on carbon capture are short-sighted, imo. this is a method using SOA technology to accelerate research into metal-organic frameworks. this is pretty cool science even if carbon capture never turns out to be feasible.
No comment on the CO2 uses, just seems like something's going on with Meta / FB lately. Who releases a framework/demo where you click the "Download ODAC23 Data" [1] or "Try ODAC ML Models" [2] links and get "404 - page not found"? Georgia Tech? They're supposedly 3rd worldwide in Business Analytics. Releasing a press release with 404's everywhere's not great "analytics".<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATASET.md#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23">https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATAS...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODELS.md#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23">https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODEL...</a><p>Did somebody even look at this stuff before writing their press release? It's not like it's much link following to click "The project, named OpenDAC" and then find out it's all a bunch of dead links.
“running quantum chemistry computations on the inputs provided by the Georgia Tech team. These calculations used about 400 million CPU hours”<p>Not sure bragging about high energy consumption helps their argument as much as they think.
It would be supremely excellent if these companies embraced the Hedera Hashgraph as a truly sustainable, net-zero (or net-negative) approach to their carbon capture tokenization efforts:<p><a href="https://hedera.com/learning/sustainability" rel="nofollow">https://hedera.com/learning/sustainability</a>
How many failed carbon capture projects do we need to make a point?<p><a href="https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-learned" rel="nofollow">https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-lear...</a>
I find that it's usually folly to speak in absolutes, but in this case I feel confident in stating:<p>The only carbon capture which will ever scale as well as we need it to scale, is carbon capture which creates carbon-based products cheaper than current fossil-fuel methods.<p>There is a company working on that, there should be a dozen.<p>Terraform Industries: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006</a><p>Interviews with CEO: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611</a>
In terms of CCS, we're probably better off reducing emissions AND capping methane emissions (MethaneSAT just launched). IIRC, CCS needs to be around 4% of the solution.
Let’s just ban all manufacturing, commerce and transportation in western countries while we all try to breathe less. That’s the only way win the war on carbon.
Carbon capture is so dumb. Just do the effective things like building out massive renewable energy generation like in China and India, phase out coal and oil, improve/install heat pumps, top down changes to phase out the use of plastic and reuse more containers like milk, soda etc like we did in the past, make nuclear plants, come up with cheap, safe lab grown meat etc.