Not sure why you say that. Urea (fertilizer made by reacting ammonia with CO2) has been made worldwide for many many decades now and is a very practical nitrogen fertilizer.
Also Methanol (dehydrates to make DME, a popular fuel in China) manufacture benefits from increased CO2 and they often buy CO2.
But all this pales for the scale of CO2 capture and you are right there.
The OP is correct to say that widespread use of EVs will require additional electricity generating capacity. But looking at this cost comparison, wind and natural gas are cheaper than coal. So if/when EVs become more widespread, it’s likely that they would mostly be powered by natural gas and wind, not coal. In the sense that the additional electricity needed for EVs would mostly come from wind and natural gas.
The issue isn’t that it is “impractical” in any technical sense; it just isn’t fiscally viable for an industry that is already in decline and is essentially just retiring plants. It is still a potentially viable method of carbon capture for natural gas and industrial processes like basic oxygen steel production, and the extracted carbon can be used to produce dimethyl ether as am77494 notes (although not on a scale that would be able to replace all use in diesel applications) and urea per the Kansai Mitsubishi Carbon Dioxide Recovery Process.
Stranger
There is also a rather effective carbon capture method that is not at all technologically difficult.
Cows?
Urea production is practical for making urea. It isn’t practical for sequestering carbon.
eschereal, if you’re referring to growing plants, sure, that’s easy. It’s also slow and takes a lot of land.
The point is that their is a profitable use for sequestered carbon that can at least partially offset the financial and energy costs of sequestering the carbon from a point-of-emission source.
Actually, carbon absorption by plants is quite efficient. The Empress tree is highly efficient, capturing 103 tons or carbon per acre-year, and best of all, doesn’t require any supply of power except from the Sun, and produces a very useful form of sequestered carbon. Molecular biologists and research botanists are working on varietals with even higher capture rates. Yes, this does take land but that just means we need to put more effort on stopping the needless clearcutting of land for low yield agriculture and to start replanting forests across the Americas and Europe that were decimated prior to the Industrial Era. And cultivating carbon-consuming plants and trees is something we can do right now at very small cost while research on other methods of carbon capture and reducing carbon emissions continues apace.
Stranger
Hey look we can sit and talk about CO2 capture methods, global dimming or nuclear energy till there’s another Ice age, but the real elephant in the room is not technical knowhow but Geopolitical economics and politics.
China is not gonna give up on coal because it’s produced domestically. Russia and Saudi Arabia are going to fight over oil prices and who knows where it will take oil prices. Right now the Natural Gas industry is taking a big hit because of low demand and future looks bleak.
Big Investments in large projects (usually big CO2 emitters) require long term predictability (technical , economic and geo political). The more the uncertainty, the more the investments will go towards “traditional conservative methods” which are usually not the best option. Look at a good logical country like Japan and see how they decided to go back to old nuclear even though new options were available. Look at Germany and see how they decided to go to coal.
And for the record, Dakota gasification used to make natural gas from coal and send most of the produced CO2 to Canada to be used in Oil wells for EOR. This was a large scale operation much in the scale of Desired CO2 capture scales. But now with cheap natural gas, their whole financial model has collapsed with no chance of recovery.
All true, and is the fundamental reason that we won’t do anything about climate change, because nobody wants to be in the circle by themselves while everybody else is dancing their way to destruction.
Stranger
Well, there really is a lot of land, and greening it up does not irreversibly consume that land, or even make it non-useful. And it is not slow, inasmuch as young plants really are pretty good at sucking up the CO2 – we do not have to wait a long time if we plant a lot of plants, which can later be selectively culled.
There are other issues as well. Deforestation of the Amazon Basin is affecting weather patterns in that region, such that most of Brazil may be destined to become Sahara West if the process is not curtailed, if it is not already too late.
Of course, the downside to aggressive bio-carbon capture of this type is the waste product: oxygen. That stuff is dangerous, corrosive and tends to cause certain catastrophic chemical reactions. We have just about exactly the right amount in the atmosphere; too much more could be a bad thing. Also, it is a problem for some 5G signals.
I bet the anaerobic microbes at the time wished they had taken quicker action on the global oxidation problem before it consumed all of their life-giving carbon dioxide and methane.
Stranger
Again, this is the narrow hat of environmental focus without taking in the whole picture.
Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica, etc etc have all approached the international community promising to not cut down forests if a fair amount of economic value is given by the industrialized nations. But they got pretty much Nada.
The broader global socio economic issues in the world need to be addressed if we want to win in the climate change challenge. It has to be a global community with global awareness and dedication to solve a global problem.
OK, Empress trees can sequester 100 tons per acre per year. The US currently produces about 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. That means we’d need 50 million acres of empress trees to sequester all of that. That’s half the area of California. And then we’d need to harvest all of that wood when the trees reached peak growth, and do something with all of it (dump it in landfills, if nothing else), and replant all of it.
And harvest and plant it in a carbon-neutral way and make sure none of it decayed. And then hope the soil will sustain a planting every decade or else find another 50 million acres to use the next decade.
Their leaders had no spine but ours d… NM
I didn’t say that planting trees would be a complete solution to offset current emissions; what I said is that it is something we can do right now to mitigate atmospheric carbon at minimal cost and energy expenditure, and frankly, it scales up to however much land cis available to be planted. As far as finding something to do with the product, wood is nature’s natural composite material with a strength-to-weight ratio exceeding that of alloy steels, natural flexibility and vibration damping properties, solid or ply-laminated wood is quite resilient if treated properly compared to many common building materials like gypsum sheetrock or medium density fiberboard, and of course wood has a negative carbon footprint compared to steel, aluminum, or cement used in concrete construction. It can also be used as a suitable substitute in many applications where plastics are used today, albeit not as cheaply as injection molding.
Apropos of nothing, Ron Swanson on wood.
“Salt water will warp the wood…so keep your tears in your eyes where they belong.”
Stranger
Back on topic, scr4 brought up the inefficiency of the refining and delivery process for oil. A quick look around suggests there’s about a 15% energy expenditure in the refining process, whether through the use of electricity or burning of some of the input oil to run the process. This guy did a pretty extensive analysis that was too long for me to dig into So: Exactly How Much Electricity Does it Take To Produce A Gallon of Gasoline?
Either way, there’s a definite cost to the refining process, and my understanding is that dirtier tar sands and some of the fracked crudes can require nearly as much energy to refine as you get out of them. The extraction and transport costs for oil and gasoline are apparently very low due to pipelines and efficient pumping and transport. For something like coal you’d have higher extraction energy, but still rather low transport energy since most of it goes by barge or rail, with no refining necessary.
So really you have to look farther down (up?) the supply chain to make meaningful comparisons. It’s not just about the efficiency of the plant/engine, but the efficiency of the fuel itself. Otherwise we’d all be heating our homes with electric resistance baseboards because they’re 100% efficient, hooray!
The other thing with making sequestration (by any method) practical is looking at the costs compared to the alternatives. I can imagine a fossil-fuel power plant that owns the appropriate amount of land, and plants trees to offset its carbon footprint. Obviously, power from that plant would cost more than from a non-offset plant of the same type. That in itself might not be a problem: You can find people willing to pay a premium for carbon-neutral power. But how much would it cost compared to the same capacity worth of, say, windmills and storage batteries? If the windmills plus batteries are cheaper than the fossil plant plus tree farm, and serve the same needs, then why build the fossil plant plus tree farm at all? And if the fossil plant plus tree farm is sufficiently expensive that there’s no reason to build it, then it can’t really be said to be practical.
So is it fair to say that if the thermal efficiency of the worst producer of electricity on the grid is above ~40% the EV is on par with an efficient ICE?
(That makes EVs a net benefit in most western nations with moderately efficient power plants.
But I still doubt the map in the article from Arstechnica.
And I want to point out that European nations would be better of subsidizing export of clean(er) power to countries with older plants than subsidizing EVs.
(banning more inefficient cars would be even better bang for our environmental buck)
It’s not the efficiency of the least-efficient plant that matters. It’s the efficiency of the marginal plant. These may or may not be the same thing. One can imagine a nation that still keeps an old, inefficient plant on their grid because it would cost even more to decommission it, but which would use plants of a more modern, efficient design if it became necessary to add more capacity.
.png){kind=link}