Researchers say they have a way to pull CO2 from the atmosphere cheaply

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Chronos

This is not a solution to anything, and it isn’t even a part of a solution. What it is, is something that could improve some other solution (or partial solution) and make it even better. We still need the other solutions.

If we turn this machine on, it’s consuming power from the grid that wasn’t being consumed before, which means we need to add that much generation to the grid. If that new generation would be from fossil fuels, which it almost certainly would be, then the absolute best results you could get from this machine would be to just turn it off.

I see two scenarios where this could be useful: The first is where we’ve already managed to convert our entire electrical generation to clean sources, but we still need portable energy sources for things like vehicles (it’s tough to beat the energy density and safety of liquid hydrocarbons). In this case, we could use some of that green electricity to make fuel for the airplanes and so on.

The second scenario is if this process can be rapidly flexible in when it uses power (I don’t know whether that’s the case). In this case, it could be attached to a grid that includes a significant fraction of green-but-unreliable sources like wind and solar, and then only run when the green sources are on.

Yes. The $250/ton figure just covers the initial step of extracting carbon from the air. This technology would have to be subsidized, outside of a perpetual energy context.

It’s an interesting backstop though. And it could create a powerful constituency for a carbon tax. I strongly suspect though that there are a lot of energy conservation activities that would kick in at lower cost, if a carbon tax of any level provided incentive to do so.

Shalmanese’s point can be adjusted to note that fuel production would become more geographically flexible with this technology. I could even imagine a nuclear power renaissance. Nuclear power has only been cost effective when many reactors of similar design are built one after the other: this happened in Canada and France. In other contexts nukes have been expensive. We would want locations with modest population density, lots of water (for nuke cooling and hydrogen for this new technology), and a pipeline for transporting the synthetic fuel. Place a nuke cluster there, scaling up over years.

[bump]

@wolfpup

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.

Actually I would think it enables it, in the sense of once they have some kind of hydrocarbon, it’s probably pretty simple to convert that into some kind of plastic type compound that would be pretty inert and decompose really slowly.

Imagine if you could just suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into polyethylene- you could just fill up old mines with polyethylene pellets and not have much of anything to worry about with groundwater contamination or anything like that.

Like others have said, energy’s the question mark, but I’d imagine that if it was a geoengineering type project, it would be public money paying for it anyway.

[k9bfriender]

@bump

Actually I would think it enables it, in the sense of once they have some kind of hydrocarbon, it’s probably pretty simple to convert that into some kind of plastic type compound that would be pretty inert and decompose really slowly.

Imagine if you could just suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into polyethylene- you could just fill up old mines with polyethylene pellets and not have much of anything to worry about with groundwater contamination or anything like that.

Like others have said, energy’s the question mark, but I’d imagine that if it was a geoengineering type project, it would be public money paying for it anyway.

Then, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million years from now, after we have all gone extinct, a new species and civilization will arise, and use these polyethylene pellets the way we use coal now.

It will also take them much longer to figure out geology, not being able to tell what were natural process and what stuff we messed with.

[Corry_El]

@Measure_for_Measure

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.

I assume the cost quoted is all-in. I don’t have tremendous faith that that would be the real cost: they could be selling it with a hopeful number, or they could be greaty underestimating how much the cost reduction once in the hands of people who do nothing but that (as opposed to those inventing new concepts). I assume there isn’t an additional operating or capital cost to have more energy generation. The idea of using the captured CO2 to make liquid fuel, with more energy input, then release when it’s burned (like growing trees and burning wood) is presumably to avoid the alternative problem of where to sequester the CO2 if you don’t do that. It doesn’t imply a free energy windfall or some greater hidden cost, necessarily.

But, the numbers as they stand are really even worse than they seem just on the basis of ‘how much more would people pay’. The EPA some years ago put the ‘real’ externality cost per tonne of CO2 at $40-$68/tonne in terms of world benefits from reduction. But domestic US benefits were estimated at only $1-$4/tonne. The latter figures need to be multiplied considering that even if a tonne removed in the US only creates $2.5 benefit in the US, a tonne removed in Japan that only benefits Japan X also benefits the US $2.5, and etc for every other country. However the US is fully 14% of fossil fuel CO2 emissions so that multiplier is only around 7 assuming uniform action, $7-$28/tonne real cost of CO2 for the US. And it makes sense that that number is lower than the global impact one because the US is a rich temperate climate country and those will be affected less negatively.

role_of_integrated_assessment_models.pdf

The specific numbers may vary in other estimates but this general issue is a little discussed part of climate change politics (if it ever got past ‘the sky is falling’ v ‘this is all a hoax’). There is a significant ‘foreign aid’ aspect to the benefit of reducing emissions in rich temperate countries. Which arguably should occur, but putting that value judgement aside for a moment, I think it filters through implicitly to public attitudes. The general idea is to convince people they will he harmed by CO2 emissions to a greater degree than the lower standards of living which must be imposed to reduce those emissions. It’s rarely directly mentioned that the avoided harm is principally to other countries. To convince people in the US they will be greatly harmed, the tendency is to exaggerate the problem overall, and people sense this even if they can’t prove it, even if their opinions of it often align on pre-existing political/cultural fault lines.

So $100-$200/tonne to remove CO2 directly is better than $600 but the ‘US first’ benefit per tonne of CO2 removed is probably a lot lower than that. If it turns out all CO2 costs are a lot higher than now believed, or that CO2 capture number goes down a lot more, then this might have great promise. But based on the numbers in the article it’s quite far from ‘too good to be true’, let’s put it that way.

[Gorsnak]

@k9bfriender

Then, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million years from now, after we have all gone extinct, a new species and civilization will arise, and use these polyethylene pellets the way we use coal now.

It will also take them much longer to figure out geology, not being able to tell what were natural process and what stuff we messed with.

That’s what you think. In actuality, this has already happened! Everyone thinks the K/T boundary was the result of a massive meteorite strike in the Gulf of Mexico, but it was actually the result of a global thermonuclear war. The advanced civilizations of the late Cretaceous period (composed of somewhat distant cousins of raptors) solved their carbon sequestration problem in a very similar way - turning captured CO2 into a more complex hydrocarbon and dumping it into abandoned mines. Over geological time, these deposits were compressed and resulted in the very coal and oil deposits we are extracting now. They then proceeded to blast themselves to smithereens and kill most everything larger than a hamster in the ensuing nuclear winter. Hopefully we can avoid their mistakes.

[dtilque]

@dtilque

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think they use gasoline, diesel, or other long-chain hydrocarbons (which this process makes) to make either concrete or steel, except for the usual transportation uses. They still use coal for steel although some is made in electric furnaces. Concrete requires lime, which is made by roasting limestone, but I’m fairly sure they burn natural gas for that.

@Shalmanese

CO2 production is a direct result of the chemical process of cement curing. Similarly, any steel made from raw iron oxide results in CO2 being produced as a part of the refining process. See here for more details.

I never said the cement and steel production didn’t generate CO[sub]2[/sub]. I said they didn’t use long hydrocarbon chain fuels in their production.

And a nitpick: curing cement actually absorbs carbon dioxide. It’s the production of lime, an essential constituent, that produces CO[sub]2[/sub]. Lime is produced by roasting limestone, which breaks down the calcium carbonate to calcium oxide (lime) and carbon dioxide. They usually use natural gas for this roasting. When cement cures, some CO[sub]2[/sub] is absorbed from the atmosphere and the lime is converted back to carbonate. However, not all of it gets converted back, since the carbon dioxide doesn’t penetrate very well to the deeper levels of the concrete.

[bump]

@k9bfriender

Then, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million years from now, after we have all gone extinct, a new species and civilization will arise, and use these polyethylene pellets the way we use coal now.

It will also take them much longer to figure out geology, not being able to tell what were natural process and what stuff we messed with.

Maybe, but then again worrying about that is like worrying about the fire’s impact on your property value instead of worrying about putting out the fire.

If we did it right, and put the pellets into subduction zones, it’s entirely possible that they’d end up with something rather petroleum-like somewhere in geologic time.

Also… if we’re extinct, it’ll likely be on the order of millions if not tens of millions of years for something to develop human-level intelligence or greater.

[k9bfriender]

@bump

Maybe, but then again worrying about that is like worrying about the fire’s impact on your property value instead of worrying about putting out the fire.

If we did it right, and put the pellets into subduction zones, it’s entirely possible that they’d end up with something rather petroleum-like somewhere in geologic time.

Also… if we’re extinct, it’ll likely be on the order of millions if not tens of millions of years for something to develop human-level intelligence or greater.

I wasn’t really worried about it, more just amused at what future archaeologists and geologists would make of it.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Corry_El

I assume the cost quoted is all-in. I don’t have tremendous faith that that would be the real cost: they could be selling it with a hopeful number, or they could be greaty underestimating how much the cost reduction once in the hands of people who do nothing but that (as opposed to those inventing new concepts).

See post 24 and 26. I think those figures just cover air capture.

But, the numbers as they stand are really even worse than they seem just on the basis of ‘how much more would people pay’. The EPA some years ago put the ‘real’ externality cost per tonne of CO2 at $40-$68/tonne in terms of world benefits from reduction. But domestic US benefits were estimated at only $1-$4/tonne.

$40-$68/ton translates to about 40-70 cents per gallon of gas. That is politically conceivable, especially if pushed in a context of taxing bads rather than goods like labor or savings.

A $2.50 tax on gas seems like a heavy lift though. Then again Germany has a whopping $3.29 tax on gasoline. Norway’s is $3.67. So this technology could be feasible in other countries in the not-so-far future.

[wolfpup]

@Ruken

That is not what the research is about. They are not publishing an innovation in chemical or electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to hydrocarbons. Or sequestration. The actual innovation they published is the concentration of carbon dioxide from 400 ppm and outputting a dry, 15 MPa stream.

While burning a bunch of natural gas along the way.

Your argument is kind of pedantic. It’s just saying that the cited paper isn’t a particularly good citation for the claim about fuel production, because it only describes the initial prerequisite step of CO2 extraction. The point is that the fuel production part isn’t some journalistic fantasy or misunderstanding, it’s something that’s actually happening using that exact technology (with one of the principal researchers involved in that effort), as described in this CBC article I previously cited which doesn’t even mention the research paper at all.

[pantom]

@wolfpup

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.

The work was done by the US Navy (full text here), and by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC),who each developed membrane processes to extract CO2 from seawater. The Navy’s interest is military – shipboard production of synthetic jet fuel far from supply lines – but I figure we can beat this sword into a ploughshare.

Rather than going after the CO2 directly with chemical scrubbers, they use electrochemical processes to split seawater into an acid and base stream, and the CO2 bubbles off from the acidified water. The two streams are recombined and returned to the ocean. While these processes are novel, they are very similar to a number of ion exchange processes, including desalination, which are currently deployed at scale.

I followed the link just to make sure it led to the right place. It did.
As for the rest, your credibility is already blown. Tata. I’ll ask John Morgan directly.

[begbert2]

@k9bfriender

I wasn’t really worried about it, more just amused at what future archaeologists and geologists would make of it.

Personally I consider confusing/messing with future archaeologists and geologists to be a bonus.

[wolfpup]

@pantom

I followed the link just to make sure it led to the right place. It did.
As for the rest, your credibility is already blown. Tata. I’ll ask John Morgan directly.

You’re a funny guy. My comment obviously refers to the article that we’re actually discussing here, linked in the OP, not whatever irrelevancy you managed to dredge up from some self-described “Promethean environmentalist”. If that’s not glaringly obvious, my quote from the first damn sentence of the article that we’re actually talking about, about pulling CO2 out of the air, should have clarified any confusion you had. Meanwhile your irrelevant one has “seawater” right in the title, so I presume that’s what it’s about. No one cares.

P.S.- Your gratuitous hostility was not really necessary or constructive. Say hi to the Promethean environmentalist for me when you ask him whatever it is you’re planning to ask.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@wolfpup

Your argument is kind of pedantic. It’s just saying that the cited paper isn’t a particularly good citation for the claim about fuel production, because it only describes the initial prerequisite step of CO2 extraction. The point is that the fuel production part isn’t some journalistic fantasy or misunderstanding, it’s something that’s actually happening using that exact technology (with one of the principal researchers involved in that effort), as described in this CBC article I previously cited which doesn’t even mention the research paper at all.

I think the underlying point is that it costs $100 - $250 to extract a ton of CO2 from the air and that steps 2 and 3 (creating fuel) cost extra. How much extra? Your article says, “Carbon Engineering’s fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil. Oldham said work is being done to reduce that.”

Promising if true. Also, “We would not be in business if carbon pricing did not exist.”

Yup.

[wolfpup]

@Measure_for_Measure

I think the underlying point is that it costs $100 - $250 to extract a ton of CO2 from the air and that steps 2 and 3 (creating fuel) cost extra. How much extra? Your article says, “Carbon Engineering’s fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil. Oldham said work is being done to reduce that.”

Promising if true. Also, “We would not be in business if carbon pricing did not exist.”

Yup.

Sure, and my very first post here (#4) expressed skepticism that this (the actual production of fuel from atmospheric carbon) would be anything but a stopgap measure to produce synthetic fossil fuels with a lower carbon footprint than conventional ones. No way that one can fully address climate change without drastic reductions in the archaic practice of burning shit in the atmosphere to get energy. Releasing carbon into the air that’s been sequestered for a hundred million years is utterly catastrophic; releasing carbon that’s recycled from current carbon sinks is not as bad, but doesn’t solve anything. My later posts were just trying to clarify what has been demonstrated and what has not.

[Ruken]

Carbon dioxide reduction to syngas, the FT reaction, and refining of the waxy syncrude you get from it are old news. Of course they’ve been demonstrated. But that’s not the research that just got published. Those steps are all physically possible. But the innovation that prompted the publication was just a DAC system redesign. Not any new chemistry.

Which is why this US taxpayer-funded research isn’t all that exciting. DAC is something you do after you’ve run out of concentrated carbon dioxide streams.

[Corry_El]

@Measure_for_Measure

1. See post 24 and 26. I think those figures just cover air capture. $40-$68/ton translates to about 40-70 cents per gallon of gas. That is politically conceivable, especially if pushed in a context of taxing bads rather than goods like labor or savings.

2. A $2.50 tax on gas seems like a heavy lift though. Then again Germany has a whopping $3.29 tax on gasoline. Norway’s is $3.67. So this technology could be feasible in other countries in the not-so-far future.

1. But they just wouldn’t be valid if they didn’t cover energy costs to conduct the process. Maybe they don’t, but IMO it’s not worth an intense debate over a broad side of barn estimate of the cost of something that hasn’t actually been scaled up to see what it actually does cost. Some supposedly said nuclear power was going to be ‘too cheap to meter’ anyway many really believed it would be cheap, while OTOH the long known to exist large oil reserves in tight formations in the US were ‘uneconomical to recover’ so US oil production would inevitably continue to decline.

2. Moreover I don’t agree with the common approach of the article, not blaming you for responding in the article’s terms, of bein’ all folksy and putting energy cost in terms of gas prices. It’s intended to ‘put it in terms people can understand’ but can end up misleading. US CO2e production (just from fossil fuel burning not land use +/- or other stuff) is something like 5 bil tonnes/yr. $500bil-$1tril isn’t overwhelming relative to GDP of around $20tril, but OTOH if the real externality cost of CO2e to the US is <$30/tonne that would be a massive waste of money. Which again IMO underlies, if only roughly, and with lots of political/culture prejudice, posturing and BS on both sides, climate politics. Just because a given expense for a given reduction doesn’t look overwhelmingly high doesn’t mean it would ever, or even should ever, be politically feasible. At some point you really also have to nail down, somehow, without alarmism or complacency, the real cost you’re seeking to avoid and come up with measures that cost less than that. It’s not just a matter of showing the costs of one’s proposed measures aren’t overwhelmingly high in absolute terms.

Also it’s not directly comparable even just for consumer motor fuel to existing high retail fuel taxes in other developed countries: those go to the general revenue purposes of their govts to support their welfare states, making them more robust and/or other taxes lower than they’d otherwise have to be. Germany et al would have to raise motor fuel taxes another say say $2.50, if that’s what it was, to do this and what they already do with existing motor fuel tax revenues.

[watchwolf49]

Couple of observations here:

1] The carbon dioxide/carbonic acid relationship in water is easily demonstrated by opening a can of soda pop … also, it’s not just carbonic acid that is formed in sea water, some of the CO[sub]2[/sub] is used to form deoxyribonucleic acid and from there the myriad of organic chemicals found throughout nature …

2] Perhaps someone can explain this “15 MPa” number being thrown around … I would think this means 15 megaPascals of pressure which is about equal to 150 atmospheres … obviously I’m mistaken, so if someone could kindly fight my ignorance …

3] Let’s slay the messenger because of the message … what is this Joule magazine? … just how rigorous is their peer-review process? … well, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the parent publishing company, “Cell Press”, which lists a kinda surprising number of magazines currently being published … Joule specifically is less than a year old having started in September of 2017 … so I’m suspicious that this is just a spin-off of a doctorial thesis mill …

4] I have no idea how many hydroelectric dams there are in British Columbia, but as soon as the Columbia River crosses into the United States, we have all but a staircase of hydrodams all the way to tide water at Portland, Oregon … so carbon-neutral electricity may well be cheap and abundant where this process is being demonstrated … we’re still left with building a windmill everyplace the wind blows, a hydrodam everyplace the water flows and solar panel everyplace the sun shines …

5] Conservation of energy … it’s the law … burning fossil fuels releases energy, therefore making fossil fuels absorbs energy … this smells like perpetual motion and I’m not sure the article explains how these energy equations are being satisfied …

I’m afraid there’s no magic solution that will allow Anglo-Americans and Western Europeans to continue to consume energy at the current rate … either severely cut back or learn to adapt to a warmer world … frankly, it bothers me that all these conversations focus on the developed world without any thought to the poor folks who are still burning wood to cook all their meals …

[Ruken]

@watchwolf49

2] Perhaps someone can explain this “15 MPa” number being thrown around … I would think this means 15 megaPascals of pressure which is about equal to 150 atmospheres … obviously I’m mistaken, so if someone could kindly fight my ignorance …

3] Let’s slay the messenger because of the message … what is this Joule magazine? … just how rigorous is their peer-review process? … well, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the parent publishing company, “Cell Press”, which lists a kinda surprising number of magazines currently being published … Joule specifically is less than a year old having started in September of 2017 … so I’m suspicious that this is just a spin-off of a doctorial thesis mill …

Yes, megapascals.

Joule is fine. They have both traditional research articles as well as more commentary/perspective pieces. I’m working on a piece now that is to be sent there. I’m not a big fan of Elsevier (who owns Cell Press) but I don’t have a problem with this journal’s standards.

[Ruken]

@watchwolf49

5] Conservation of energy … it’s the law … burning fossil fuels releases energy, therefore making fossil fuels absorbs energy … this smells like perpetual motion and I’m not sure the article explains how these energy equations are being satisfied.

Nobody is proposing perpetual motion. This has been already covered in this thread. Liquid fuels are excellent for energy storage and transportation. It’s hard to fly a plane using solar panels, a windmill, or a dam. You dig those liquids up or make them using lots of energy generated by your method of choice.