This sounds fascinating, but it’s way over my head. The researchers say they can do this cheaply enough to produce fuel at industrial scale at prices competitive with existing fossil fuels. If it works, it has the potential to help stabilize the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. If implemented at sufficient scale, we could have a lot of fuel that would essentially be recycling CO2 already in the atmosphere, reducing the amount of new carbon we’re releasing currently. The researchers have already shown this method will work on a small scale, and they say industrial scale production us possible as early as 2021.
This sounds like a massive breakthrough. The research was published in a legitimate science journal, and other scientists interviewed for the story expressed cautious optimism. On the other hand, oftentimes new breakthroughs don’t pan out for various reasons, and the lay press has hard time conveying the nuances in a scientific paper, making the results seem more definitive than they may be in reality.
So. This sounds really exciting and possibly buys us a lot of time to address climate change. Or maybe it’s yet another solution that will always be five years away. What say you?
It sounds interesting and economical, but not cheap: [INDENT][INDENT]The new paper says it can remove the same ton for as little as $94, and for no more than $232. At those rates, it would cost between $1 and $2.50 to remove the carbon dioxide released by burning a gallon of gasoline in a modern car.[/INDENT][/INDENT] Anybody eager to have a $1-$3/gal increase in the cost of gasoline, phased in and increased with inflation over time? Anybody consider that cheap?
I’d be all for such a policy. But it’s at the high end of what is considered politically palatable. It would also involve a massive increase in our energy infrastructure, presumably some mix of solar, wind, and nuclear. You need energy to pull CO2 out of the air after all.
That said, a carbon tax combined with subsidies for CO2 capture from the air would solve our problem. But that’s been known since 1990.
They don’t say how much fuel they can make from a ton of CO2 nor how much that process would cost. Obviously, reducing the cost of pulling CO2 out of the sky is an important consideration for the total cost of producing fuel, but that’s not meaningful if the cost of CO2 recapture is still more expensive than, say, mining coal and if the Fischer-Tropsch isn’t competitive to petroleum refining techniques.
That sad, whether it’s cheaper to reduce CO2 emissions or not, it’s likely more feasible to pull it from the air. It also starts us on the way to global climate control, which will be more useful in the long run.
On the plus side, one problem this idea avoids is the problem of carbon sequestration, which may be very difficult or intractable in the long run. On the minus side, since the alternative is creating carbon-based fuels, it is at best a partial contribution to the stabilization – not reduction – of atmospheric carbon.
The big problems are the operating costs and scalability, about which I have no idea but based on prior history, I’m skeptical on general principle. Since it’s essentially converting carbon back into fossil fuels, this one single activity – if it is indeed to stabilize carbon emissions – has to generate more energy every year than the energy produced by the world’s total fossil fuel consumption. That’s a pretty tall order, and generating all that energy without further pollution is an even taller order.
On balance I think the bottom line is that if it is indeed cost-effective and scalable – and those are very big if’s – then it would be at best a component of an overall emissions reduction strategy that would necessarily have to include significant reductions in fossil fuel use, and strategies to not only curtail the increase in atmospheric carbon, but actually reduce it through natural and possibly artificial sequestration. This is no more a panacea to climate change than ideas about injecting sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere or launching orbiting umbrellas and other such fanciful ideas.
I’m not going to pretend to understand everything said in this article, but the core argument is that CO2 is far more concentrated in seawater than in the air, which makes it a far more practical source for carbon removal and synfuel generation:
Did you actually read the article? It specifically talks about “a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere”. I didn’t see where it had anything to do with seawater.
There certainly have been schemes proposed for the creation of synthetic biofuels by extracting carbon from ocean water, but the relationship of such schemes to mitigating climate change is pretty much non-existent. The oceans contain absolutely massive amounts of carbon in various forms, including the carbolic acid that forms from anthropogenic CO2 – in total about 50 times more carbon than in the atmosphere – and the flux of that carbon may be positive or negative at any given time and place, dependent on partial pressures, winds, currents, temperature, and many other factors. Extracting small amounts of carbon out of the ocean would have no beneficial effects on atmospheric carbon and in fact would likely make it worse by accelerating the transfer from a major carbon sink back into the atmosphere.
If there is a tipping point that would lead to an extinction event, I would expect it to occur in the ocean, not in the air or on land, based on previous extinction events. While the ocean has been serving as a CO2 sink, I don’t believe that that’s actually a good thing.
Arrgghh… carbonic acid, not carbolic! :smack: :smack: :smack:
I must still have You Rang 'M’Lord? on the brain, where Teddy Meldrum is infatuated by young servant girls with freshly scrubbed faces and the scent of carbolic soap!
That’s probably true, but there’s even less we can do about it through direct removal than we can about atmospheric CO2. Our best first step is to stop digging up carbon that’s been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years and releasing it into the atmosphere, much of which eventually ends up in the ocean.
I dunno, if I’m digging a hole and throwing the dirt into a barrel, and my main priority is to have the barrel not overflow, then stopping digging isn’t particularly different from poking a hole in the side of the barrel and shoving the dirt that leaks out the hole back into the barrel at the same rate it’s coming out.
The CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere and ocean are in dynamic equilibrium with each other. That is, if you pull a bunch of it out of the ocean, you’ll disturb that equilibrium and it will be restored by more CO[sub]2[/sub] going into solution in the ocean from the atmosphere. And vice versa. So it shouldn’t really matter where you take the carbon dioxide from.
As for the process in the OP, it’s only as carbon neutral as the power grid. Those chemical processes that it uses to convert the CO[sub]2[/sub] to fuel take a fair amount of energy. If the power is generated by burning fossil fuels, it’s not helping at all. In fact, it’d probably be negative.
Another potential problem with it is that it requires hydrogen. Right now, industrial hydrogen is usually created by high temperature reaction of methane and water, which releases carbon monoxide. If that process is still being used, either that monoxide has to be captured or else it’s releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. Which would defeat the purpose of the whole thing. Ideally, they’d generate the hydrogen by electrolysis of water with power generated from solar or wind power.
I don’t understand the process. I think most don’t. I think those of us who don’t (myself included) tend on first hearing to get the false impression that something like a perpetual-motion machine has been discovered - something that has the capacity to neutralize a major problem, without itself causing other problems. It sounds too good to be true.
That’s not correct. Of course in theory there is equilibrium between the partial pressure of CO2 in the ocean surface at any given place and time and that of the overlying atmosphere, but the real situation is much more complex. One of the most significant factors is that the absorbed CO2 reacts with water to form carbonic acid and carbonate and bicarbonate ions, which removes the CO2 from the equilibrium equation and allows the oceans to absorb and hold far more carbon than they otherwise would. This is why oceans have been absorbing CO2 at a fairly steady rate ever since industrialization, continuously taking up nearly half of it even as it increased from 285 to 400 ppm in the atmosphere, and the oceans of course acidifying in the process. Also, the ocean’s CO2 composition is heterogenous and mixes very slowly, containing more CO2 at depth than near the surface, and tending to absorb CO2 in high-latitude waters while actually emitting it in tropical waters.
You don’t have to understand the process in detail. Because there is no such thing as perpetual motion, you can be confident that the process uses more energy than you’d get back by burning the fuel, even if you ignore the inefficiency of the internal combustion engine. So basically it’s a way to convert electrical energy from the grid to power vehicles, but in a very inefficient way. It’s virtually certain that just switching to an EV would be more efficient.
This technology would mainly be useful if there were a sizeable number of people who will insist on driving ICEs, no matter how good EVs become. And I’d be very surprised if a large number of them do not exist, although the numbers should decline as time goes by.
You are probably correct, but it seems unlikely that Bill Gates would be putting the technology through if it didn’t have some promise of being competitive, so I’d rather reserve some amount of optimism that factoring for the inefficiency of the internal combustion engine and the costs associated with pumping, moving, and refining crude oil, that it ends up (somehow) working out to be within the ballpark.
Though, I’ll also say that Lithium Sulfur is looking promising and that could destroy the internal combustion engine entirely.
Carbonic acid is just another way of saying “carbon dioxide dissolved in water”. There’s nothing special about it. And as long as they’re in solution, there will be further equilibria between CO[sub]2[/sub] and carbonate and bicarbonate ions. So if you get rid of some of the carbon dioxide in the ocean, some will come out of the ions. The only sink is if the ions react with something and make a compound that is not soluble and it precipitates out of solution.
The oceans have been absorbing more carbon dioxde because of the great increase in atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub] in the last two centuries has changed the equilibrium point. If you remove some of the gas, it moves the equilibrium point back and the oceanic concentration will adjust. It may not be a perfect readjustment because of the precipitation, but should be pretty close. The ocean depth stuff may make the process take longer than otherwise, but shouldn’t change the final result.
It’s not $2.50 added on top of the price of existing gasoline, it’s $2.50 to produce a brand new source of gasoline that’s carbon neutral. Existing gasoline requires you to set up large wells in politically unstable regions, shipping that in giant tankers across oceans and then refining it in complex and dirty refining plants. This proposed plan will let you set up a plant almost anywhere where you’re sucking in air, combining it with hydrogen and energy and spitting out combustible fuel as an end product.
