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In a U.S. First, a Commercial Plant Starts Pulling Carbon From the Air
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Trees do it much cheaper.
Yeah, I mean I think carbon capture is kinda stupid on one level. It's like an excuse for us to not change our behavior
No. Carbon neutral isn’t enough. We are going to have to go carbon negative.
We can’t just take hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon and dump it into the atmosphere and leave it there to re-sequester itself. That’s going to take a long time to reverse enough to even buck the current trend of global warming, if we were able to just go carbon neutral today.
Trees also don’t really sequester carbon for long. They die, and the carbon gets eaten by organisms and the cycle continues. Or it burns and most of the carbon is released instantly and only ash remain.
Coal only got there specifically because there was nothing evolved to eat lignin for a long time and dead trees piled up so high that dead trees on top ended up compressing their ancestors into it.
Crude only got there because plants and algae in shallow water died, mixed into sediment, rinse, repeat times a few million years, get compressed by the weight of all the layers above, and turn to crude.
The sequestration of ancient carbon wasn’t just by virtue of being plants, but what happened after those plants died.
not only do we need to be carbon negative but we need to move and store more volume than any industry in history ... or is it all industry in history. the idea is absurd either way.
It is a historically unprecedented and utterly necessary project. Only a combination of all of the above can even get us close. It's way too late to be choosy.
Yeah, this is like the inventor that wanted to use floating booms to clean up the ocean... Totally impossible
Picking up trash with a net is a a little easier than collecting 1 trillion tonnes of CO~2~ from 5.1 quadrillion tonnes of atmosphere, then somehow storing it directly or converting it back into into stable solid or liquid for storage.
It's not impossible, but in terms of difficulty and expense the two are orders of magnitudes apart from each other. Like "inventing the wheel" vs "landing on the moon."
I keep hoping some smart environmentalist/entrepreneurs figure out more markets for sequestered carbon. For example how we can use more wood in construction. I just can't see the right kind of social change happening before it's too late so hopefully there's a way to capitalism our way out of this.
I essentially just said the same thing in another reply before I read this one.
I don’t think growing more trees for sequestering is, alone, going to work, due to the sheer scale. Growing trees itself is great. We should totally do that. But for the purpose of sequestering carbon long-term, it’s not that great.
Best we could hope for is a method to discover some new building material that we could manufacture directly from captured atmospheric carbon. Then there is a downstream market for it and the carbon gets “sequestered” as part of our economy of durable goods. Like an alternative to wood, or copper, PVC/PEX, or cement, or steel studs, or rubber, or concrete, or plastic, or hell even girders.
That also would buy us a decade or two, at least, to figure out how to effectively recycle said materials, and be free of a lot of industrial sources of ancient carbon.
Unless humans get involved and harvest and sequester the tree remains themselves.
Then there still is still a need to expend tons of energy disposing it in a way to not have it re-release in a few hundred thousand years.
The scale is insane to comprehend. We would essentially have to manufacture the equivalent of every pound of coal that’s ever been burned to get to pre-industrial levels, while also consuming as little fossil fuels as possible. I do not think it is possible to do so with trees alone unless we have a lot of cheap green power. Because ultimately some entity, be it government or corporation or philanthropist, will have to pay for it.
And then there is the issue of land rights for where you’re gonna dump all of the captured carbon. That’s a problem either way. I hope we start discovering some new post-space-age reclaimed-carbon-based building materials. That’s probably the best we could hope for. Then there is a huge downstream market for captured carbon which means way less ancient carbon being pulled up into the cycle, and hopefully we can get start regrowing back some old-growth forests and continue to sustainably harvest old wood.
I’m not poo-pooing this technology. It’s super important for us to invest and scale up carbon capture methods. But it can’t be expected to be immediately economically viable. It’s still very immature. Thats not a bad thing. That just means it needs time (and funding) to mature.
Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t saying it’s a good idea. But absent any fancy technology it’s not entirely impossible to plant fast growing trees, harvest them, and then bury them in a mine or at the bottom of a hypoxic body of water.
It would certainly have to be a global, multi-generational undertaking. But it looks like that’s going to be the case with every other solution as well.
I thought this hypothesis was disproved and it was some geological process that buried the trees? I remember there was a study about lignin content in other fossils and it was compatible with fungi decomposing wood.
The trees got buried in oxygen-free peat bogs where decomposers could not survive.
Yup. It's a technological antisolution.
An argument is that this is what we should use excess green electricity for. But it does not make sense to run such expensive equipment only a few hours each day. I prefer matching the supply to demand with hydro storage, not to mention that most grids are nowhere near 100% renewable.
Don't worry, we replaced all the forests with CarbVac™️ facilities. Ensuring a brighter tomorrow, but only if we're the ones getting paid to do it.
You are right.
But it’s less certain.
There’s a decent amount of carbon emissions associated with management of land, however, and if you want the land to continue to be optimised for carbon sequestration you’ll need to manage it and, besides, in most areas you can’t just buy land, plant some trees on and leave it - it’ll need active management to stay a forest and to comply with local regulation.
But let’s say you’re doing that and planting for carbon sequestration, then you’d probably choose something like pine (fast growing, absorbs a lot of carbon, stays green through the year so tends to prevent competition on the floor). A tree that like will absorb roughly a tonne (1000-1100 kg of carbon) in its life. Then it dies and you’ll need to remove it to ensure a new tree can grow (otherwise it’ll be taken over by other species slowly).
A hectare of dense pine trees can probably hold 3000 trees (if we are being generous) so a hectare (100x100 metres of land) can hold 3000 tonnes of carbon. On average in Europe we emit about 9 tonnes of carbon per year and live for 80 years so a hectare can hold about 4 people’s worth of life time emissions.
In the U.K. you’ll end up spending about £25,000 for a hectare of woodland (give or take), but then you’ll need public liability insurance and management fees (let’s just say £20/year for for a hectare of insurance and £750/year for management of a hectare) … so let’s assume £800/year for a hectare or £200/year to manage the size of woodland required to absorb a person’s life time emissions (remember, 4 people per hectare). Now you need a trust manager who runs it, permanently forevermore, to manage it all. Let’s say £40,000/year and assume that they manage 1000 people’s life time emissions (this obviously could scale down to almost zero as the scheme grew) or £40/year per person.
But don’t forget additionally: This has to be NEW woodland, so you need to buy non-woodland and then plant the woodland. Otherwise you’re not absorbing more carbon. Typical quotes for a hectare of pine planting will be about £4000.
And this cost needs paying forevermore: £6000 to buy the space for a person’s emission £4000 to plant it £250/year to manage it (insurance, management)
To deliver £250/year you’ll need an investment of 250/0.04=£6250. Let’s just say £7000 to leave some buffer for bad years and to pay for the additional carbon that’s emitted from the management. So:
£6000 to buy the space for a person’s emissions. £4000 to plant it.
£7000 to manage it forevermore.
So all in you’ll need to spend £17000 to absorb your lifetime’s worth of emissions.
Now let’s compare that to geological sequestration. Climeworks, the only publically available scheme to suck carbon out of the air and sequester it into rock, permanently, quotes £1100/ton of carbon. So to extract the 720 tones you’ll emit in your lifetime it would be £792,000.
So yeah, trees do it a LOT cheaper (2% of the cost), but it requires active management and it’s not guaranteed to be on geological scale.
And I’m not aware of a scheme that enables this to happen. Are you?
Is this one of those situations like solar panels where the tech will get cheaper over time?
No doubt. But we can’t afford to wait. We need it yesterday.
All the more reason to develop the tech then.
I feel like you could do both? carbon capture facility underground with trees ontop and intakes poking through the ground? Wouldn't even have to burry the facility just build it with a heavy duty roof garden in mind.
Tree roots go down far. You definitely could not run carbon sequestering underneath.
But then again, why would you? Why even bother with sucking it out of the air if trees are so much cheaper? And the added benefit is that you’ll be rewilding land, so it impacts biodiversity too.
As mentioned elswhere in the thread, running a carbon capture plant is something you could just do when renewables are producing excess output which would be more efficient than just winding them down.
Very few renewables are wound down, though. Usually the excess is used to fill pumped storage or turn down hydro plants. For now that’s a viable strategy but soon are exceed renewable will be have to be used someplace else so it’s not a bad idea. I doubt it’ll be enough though.
Trees got solar panels built in you're not gonna win this one.
If you build enough solar and wind to kick fossils off the grid, they’re going to overproduce at times of peak operation. Rather than wasting that peak production, use it to process CO2.
Also, Canada’s forests burned so hard, they were a net emitter this year. I’m not sure how reliable a carbon sink trees really are as the warming gets worse…
You need nuclear, too. There isn’t enough solar and wind manufacturing and deployment capacity for the foreseeable future to eliminate fossil use. There is no solution to climate change which does not involve significant numbers of new nuclear builds.
Geothermal. It doesn't matter where you put up those carbon capture facilities. Meaning you could put them in the desert, you could them next to some vulcanos...and so on.
And nuclear builds are a waste of carbon...all that steel and concrete is most of the time not calculated when co2/kwh gets...well, calculated
Wow.
Be more wrong.
Seriously, try; I’ll wait.
They pull it out of the atmosphere, and release it when burned (or rotting etc.).
Far better than putting new co2 in the atmosphere.
Sure is a shame there's so many scams related to that area. In theory, planting or protecting forests is one of the best things we can do. But in practice? A lot of organizations that claim to protect some area from industrialization are actually protecting an area that was never at risk in the first place. That is, if they didn't exist, the forest would be unchanged. Others are only protected for short periods of time. https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY?si=56uG8zf1iAeJM31H
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