Is carbon capture a viable solution?

5 Billion Cubic Meters of Oil are produced Annually by humanity.<p>30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.<p>60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and&#x2F;or mobile.<p>40% is sequestrable and large scale&#x2F;stationary.<p>12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.<p>You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.<p>50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground.<p>6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.<p>Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter.<p>Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.<p>Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?<p>The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.

I don&#x27;t even know why this is a question. So, people burn hydrocarbons for energy. How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy? Please draw this chemical reaction out, along with energy balances and how endothermic it is.<p>The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics. Life actually does a pretty good job of turning CO2 into dirt which gets buried -encouraging that rather than building some preposterous contraption involving mineshafts seems a little more sensible.

Since overproduction is a good way of dealing with variability of solar + wind and because carbon capture uses quite a lot of energy this might be a good use of over produced energy (those periods when energy prices go negative).<p>Better than mining Bitcoin.

I&#x27;ve been trying to figure out what the best way to become a &quot;net zero carbon human&quot;. Although there&#x27;s a clear consensus that reducing emissions is great, but what&#x27;s next? What do you do with the emissions you inevitably produce? As an amateur, it&#x27;s super confusing: - offsetting is criticised as &quot;paying of your guilt without fixing the problem&quot; - carbon capture is next to impossible as an individual because there are so few projects to sponsor, besides planting trees which has questionable returns in the long run since who can guarantee these trees will not be burned 50 years from now?<p>Any ideas or good overviews are welcome.

&gt;In the IEA&#x27;s &quot;Clean Technology Scenario&quot;, more than 28 GtCO2 could be captured from industrial facilities between now and 2060.<p>We emit about 35-40 GtCO2 per year. So in 40 years, we might expect carbon capture to remove less than one year of emissions.<p>Not useless, but close, considering the investment which could be used instead to more rapidly reduce emissions by installing&#x2F;improving solar, wind, geothermal, etc.

No order of magnitude estimation and no time-scale. Carbon capture is irrelevant. This problem has to be solved at the root -- the energy demand. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;withouthotair.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;withouthotair.com&#x2F;</a>

They key metric here is how much it costs ($&#x2F;TON of CO2 Captured and Sequestered). There are a range of methods and approaches to do this. The average cost for Air Capture across modern approaches is $250&#x2F;Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered.<p>There are other approaches besides Atmospheric Capture and Sequestration which hold more promise 1. High concentration C02 Emission Capture at source 2. Ocean surface capture and de-acidification<p>Wrote a quick article describing all of them linking to specific research papers and their results here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectcelsius.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;capture-methods&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectcelsius.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;capture-methods&#x2F;</a><p>I expect this will follow a similar journey to how solar panel adoption went... once things tipped over the critical ($&#x2F;KWH) where it made sense over grid electrical, people started to adopt. I imagine once one of the techniques reaches a critical $&#x2F;TON Captured &amp; Sequestered, governments or institutions will pay to build whatever machines to start. Right now things are too expensive using any method (i.e. using the best method, it would cost ~$12 Trillion dollars to capture and sequester ~49 Gigatons - the estimated carbon emitted in 1 year by humans in 2020)

The article fails to answer the question, and the whole site appears to just be a clickbait ad farm. They have an article on hyperloop which fails to denounce it, calls it &quot;one of the greatest leaps in transportation for generations&quot; which tells us these articles are not reflections of critical thought.

A dangerous thing with this I think is that it risks cementing current unsustainable practices. It gives people and politicians, today, a sense of relief which stops them from doing the absolutely urgent actions that are needed right now (or was needed many years ago)...

Simply put no. The cost to implement is too high and is essentially the same as what we do for Municipal Solid Waste (just bury it). I put it in a slightly less insane category than geo-engineering. The only places that I see carbon capture as potentially viable as a transition is using it to offset industrial process gases necessary. I.e. capture CO2 from coal plant for cement production - however that is niche case as siting is key and transportation is too expensive.<p>How do we solve climate change? Deploy, deploy, deploy. We have renewable energy that is cheap and available. Change the policy incentives at the federal away from subsidizing oil and gas and incentives green energy. De-carbonize the transportation sector with EV and HZEV. Reduce Natural Gas for home heating with the injection of Hydrogen into the fuel lines (up to 20%). Invest in research and development into further productionizing effective technologies.<p>Let&#x27;s skip the wasted capital, debate and energy and move on. Also, let us not forget that Oil and Gas Majors have been deploying considerable money into this sector for decades to prolong their existence. I for one do not want to subsidize their behavior any more as they have been trying to scuttle the climate date since the 80s.

If the coal burning power plants are already starting to lose the bid to wind power and photovoltaics, I doubt they stand a chance with the substantial added cost of CCS. Maybe it could be used to sort of pull carbon from the atmosphere if it was combined with renewable fuels. But it does not seem likely that it&#x27;s going to save fossil fuel profits.

Since carbon capture is energetically expensive (by definition), industrial use of it (as opposed to some schemes like enhanced weathering or other geoengineering approaches) can only be part of a viable solution in a few manners:<p>a) As a way to offset carbon released by tasks that cannot be feasibility (or at least easily) de-carbonized directly. Random examples might be concrete, or maybe jet airplanes.<p>b) As a way to try to draw down atmospheric CO2 even faster once we are predominantly transition to de-carbonized energy sources.<p>Pilot plants that exist today are just that - pilots. They may be useful as ways for us to learn what to do when we get to worlds that are well described by a) or b)... but we really gotta get there first.

The way I see it, it&#x27;s carbon capture or geo-engineering. Pick one.<p>We have been past the point of no return with climate change for a few years now, so only active measures can reverse it; going green will slow down the inevitable, which should still be done, but it doesn&#x27;t fix the problem.<p>I think this is a reality that will only settle into the public consciousness a few decades from now. Most people still feel like solar panels and electric cars are a solution, so they don&#x27;t put as much thought into the drastic active measures we will eventually be forced to take.<p>It&#x27;s not &quot;can we use carbon capture and geo-engineering&quot;, it&#x27;s &quot;how and when&quot;.

Carbon capture is certainly a viable technology. The question is whether the politicians have the will to act.<p>Emerging carbon capture technologies can sequester atmospheric CO2 at low enough prices.<p>Last I checked, the prices were between $15-$75 per ton, which translates into $0.15-0.75 per gallon of gasoline burnt. Other carbon fuels would have similar costs per energy produced.<p>We need to transition to a carbon-negative economy as quickly as possible. Current atmospheric levels of CO2 are not sustainable.

What people normally call &quot;CCS&quot; is mostly a short-term hack to keep the coal mines running. If you&#x27;re going to burn coal, then, yes, please do CCS, but pretty soon you need to stop burning coal. I also don&#x27;t trust that CO2 will stay underground forever; that also makes it &quot;short term&quot;.<p>That said, we do need direct air capture (DAC) to repair the damage and to provide an alternative source for CO2 and hydrocarbons.<p>...<p>To this end, I kind-of like algae as a low-tech solar-powered method:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;bioscience&#x2F;article&#x2F;60&#x2F;9&#x2F;722&#x2F;238034" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;bioscience&#x2F;article&#x2F;60&#x2F;9&#x2F;722&#x2F;238034</a><p>I feel you could do this in a moderate-sized backyard.<p>You wouldn&#x27;t want to bury the biomass directly (say as biochar) because you wouldn&#x27;t want to lose the NPK nutrients -- but the above article deals with that. It describes a couple methods to extract carbon while recycling the other nutrients. None seem too difficult.<p>...<p>In a completely different direction, nuclear-powered Sabatier&#x2F;Bosch&#x2F;electrolysis is also interesting:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electrochemical_reduction_of_carbon_dioxide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electrochemical_reduction_of_c...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sabatier_reaction#International_Space_Station_life_support" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sabatier_reaction#Internationa...</a><p>...<p>Either way, you have to combine your DAC with... not mining fossil fuels out of the ground. You have to do both.<p>(Note: Carbon-neutral fuels (bio-, synthesized) are fine, e.g. for air travel. You just can&#x27;t mine them from the earth. That&#x27;s the one rule. Then the cost of recapturing CO2 has to be baked into everything else.)

I have been wondering about using this lately too.<p>Why not set up carbon capture units near alternative energy sources? It is certainly not going to be cheap and there are no real economic incentives for it other than hope for future generations. So, I don&#x27;t know about the political viability considering this would have to be a massive project run by multiple governments.<p>But, if we put political viability aside for a second and just think pie in the sky here, technically, why not? As someone else pointed out, nature does this too. But those processes are simply too slow for the rate at which we are emitting. So, I think giving nature some help, at least until we have converted sufficiently to renewable is a good idea and may buy us the time we need.

Carbon capture from power plants would contain a mixture of CO2, NOx and SOx, and very few projects (see article) have ever attempted to capture this corrosive mixture, on an industrial scale, for a very long time. It is quite a complicated and energy-intensive process (collect the gases, compress&#x2F;liquify&#x2F;make supercritical, transport, convert P&#x2F;V&#x2F;T again, pump it down).<p>I know that the Norwegians (or perhaps various multinationals) have been doing this for decades, capturing CO2 at the source, at the Sleipner giant oil field in the North sea . But that is not a power plant.

Crazy time. I was fantasizing about a complete crazy thing lately. What if there was some small device that could turn energy into carbon capturing? Let says there was such a device, we could mount it onto every bicycle on this planet and every time people drive around it might be a bit more exhausting (good for your health!), but at the same time we would capture carbon from the air. Is this a crazy idea? I guess it is... But somehow I think it must be possible! If you know how to built it, let me know. I will sell it like crazy ;)

Environmental Carbon Capture is a terrible engineering solution.<p>CO2 is millions of times more concentrated when it leaves the smokestack than it is in the general atmosphere. Any sensible approach would focus on removing CO2 where it is most concentrated and easiest to remove.<p>I really want carbon capture to be viable, but so far it seems like a distraction.

&gt;&gt; The ability to generate additional power thanks to geologically stored CO2 which could be used to extract geothermal heat from the same locations in which it’s injected, producing renewable geothermal energy.<p>The article doesn&#x27;t go into detail, but this is intriguing. Has there been a prototype anywhere?

What is the probability of an event that will compensate the effects in say next 50 years? e.g. nuclear exchange of X warheads or major volcanic activity etc ?

I wonder how much natural sources emit. Could we extract and sequester sources like Lake Nyon for example?

Carbon capture seems to me similar to plastics recycling which was invented by the oil and plastics industry. They always knew that recycling wouldn’t be economically viable at scale but kept pushing it anyway. I can’t imagine how we could capture any meaningful amount of CO2 and store it in a safe and economical way. It just seems another smokescreen like “clean coal”.

The only reason I&#x27;m tolerating the whole carbon craze is that most legislation is also helping with the real evil of pollution, that is killing here and now. And people are proposing to start whole new industries with their own pollutants just so we can keep dirty industries running longer? &lt;insert expletive here&gt;

My wife was asking why there’s never anything positive reported about climate change. I didn’t have a good answer.<p>I mean I understand that it’s mostly all bad but you’d think any change would at least benefit a few people.

No, it&#x27;s a stop gap solution promoted mainly by those looking to keep on exploiting fossil fuels for a little while longer. There are lots of companies that are looking to do this because they are knee deep into legacy infrastructure that they can&#x27;t shut down overnight because it would kill them.<p>However, continuing improvements in pricing for renewable energy (wind&#x2F;solar + storage) make most such propositions increasingly less viable from both a carbon footprint point (you release more than you capture) of view and an economical perspective (spending money to make an already expensive solution less damaging).<p>Mostly it&#x27;s a strategy pursued by companies that are protecting a sunk cost in the form of existing infrastructure to stretch its economic life a little bit longer. It&#x27;s also a strategy for green-washing things that really aren&#x27;t that green. Ultimately it&#x27;s cheaper to not bother putting CO2 in the atmosphere thus removing the need to add cost by compensating for that elsewhere. Long term, most carbon capture schemes will end up on the wrong side of a cost equation.<p>The long term perspective for most gas and coal plants is basically extremely grim with or without carbon capture. Investors are actively divesting for this reason for most of the last decade already.<p>There are of course still a few countries building coal plants but most are in the process of actively shutting them down and on a clear path to getting rid of them completely. IMHO, most remaining ones will not make it to their current planned retirement dates for the simple reason of it ultimately becoming unsustainable economically to keep them going. To some extent that has already played out for most coal plants. Germany went against the trend here by opening a new one recently (probably for political reasons, the brown coal lobby runs strong in parts of Germany). But it&#x27;s an anomaly in a market otherwise dominated by premature closures of plants.<p>Likewise gas plants are converting to being peaker-plants in a lot of markets that have fluctuating supply of increasing amounts of solar and wind. This vastly reduces the appeal of building new ones; but the reality is that the more renewable energy hits the market the less attractive it gets to operate gas plants. In some markets batteries form a perfectly adequate and cheaper substitute for having lots of gas peaker plants. I&#x27;d say investing in a new gas plant that supposedly will run for a few decades is at this point extremely misguided as an investment strategy.<p>It only makes sense if there&#x27;s lots of stupid money (i.e. tax payer money) involved. Put bluntly, that&#x27;s what most carbon capture schemes boil down to: stupid money. It&#x27;s basically tax payers paying for the privilege of paying too much for electricity and corporations helping themselves to this cash on the basis of empty promises and a green-washing strategy.<p>We&#x27;re decades away from having fossil free energy production world wide; but several countries are looking to get there in 10-15 years nevertheless.

Grow more trees?

No.

I question the legitimacy of an article about carbon capture that leads off with a picture of a nuclear power plant’s steam cooling tower.

If civilisation as we know it is almost, at, or past, the no point of return, does it actually matter given it’s our only option?