I think Carbon Capture is a legitimate and respectable area of research, but it’s fuckall for any practical use today or tomorrow and it should never be treated as a replacement for emission goals or the maintenance of critical ecosystems.
Carbon capture is 100% useless until the day that we completely stop using carbon energy sources.
Even if you use solar panels, that energy would better be used directly.
It’s not useless. Carbon capture will have to become mandatory at industries that will still require fossile fuels for a little longer after electrifying everything. Think cement and steel production. This is called on-site carbon capture and prevents releasing more carbon to the atmosphere. This is already happening.
Now that stupid thing that sucks C02 gas out of the air, yes, it’s total bollocka and will never ever work efficiently. Maybe if we eventually develop cheap fusion power.
But that isn’t how technology works. We’ll need carbon capture to be at a point where we can actively remove carbon from the atmosphere at a higher rate than it enters the atmosphere as we ween off carbon fuels if we ever want to survive climate change long term.
We will almost certainly need to remove carbon already in the atmosphere. Yes, we can wish getting serious about climate change one or two decades ago would have made that unnecessary, but we’re stuck with this choice now. Short of replacing every single carbon producing device tomorrow, that’s where we’re at.
There is a lot of things wrong with your statement but first and foremost is that Carbon Neutral is no longer a solution for our problems. Without a way to alleviate and regulate emissions already in the atmosphere the Human Race is still on a death march if it stopped producing today, much moreso 30 years from today. In addition to that, the sale of power to consumers can just increase consumption, and the infrastructure to move power and store power where it is needed is not necessarily there so for example Iceland’s Geothermal powered Carbfix may not be efficient on paper compared to magically selling the power off to a far off place: it is still an optimal nearly lossless solution given their circumstances.
No, my statement is perfect correct.
Starting carbon capture while there is still fossil fuel power generation is stupid at best. If you do it for research, sure, go nuts. Anything beyond is just making shit worse.
If you have the energy and no where to get it to, that might be the one exception, perhaps but that’s it.
If you do carbon capture with energy from CO2 power then you’re literally making it worse trying to make it better. If you use non CO2 power you’re still doing it wrong because of losses, that power would be better used to avoid others using CO2, you’d be more energy efficient that way.
My point is that there are multiple companies currently doing carbon capture and its just stupid, its another one of those “look at me being smart! Pay me money!” schemes that want government money that would be better spent on replacing CO2 power sources instead.
The “one exception” just described the vast majority of the operations. There is no using the power to avoid using CO2 because that’s not how the power market works at all. If prices go down, consumption goes up. If you think some Carbon Capture facilities are a net zero effect aside from collecting data then that’s fine, if you think they’re a dumb thing to be spending resources on then that is fine, but you’re absolutely not correct to say it’s more efficient to put all that energy into a giant capitalist grid.
I’m not saying that at all, I’m saying that it’s literally throwing a bucket of water on the floor and then mopping it up. Better not throw the bucket on the floor to begin with
Okay well the reality is people have been throwing water on the floor for 20 years and you don’t want us to clean it up.
No.
People have been throwing water on the floor for 200 years now, since the start of the industrial revolution, and right now a huge hose is connected to an enormous water tap and that hose dumps all the water straight on the floor.
You want to take a mop on that, I say that the mop is make ng it worse, because I need you to help me get rid of that hose.
Once the hose is gone, please by all means, mop away, we will need it, I fully agree. But while that hose is dumping water, I need you ) that is, the entire world) to first focus on stopping the water flow.
Edit: and just so you understand the severity of the situation: even if we spend 5-70% of the worlds energy budget on mopping 24/7, we’ll likely be mopping for the next CENTURIES to get rid of all the extra CO2 we dumped for the past 200 years.
Carbon capture, Carbon footprint, Carbon offsetting…
All things invented by oil and gas corporations to greenwash themselves in the public eye while they destroy the planet.
Good old offsetting.
Where it’s OK to cheat on your wife, as long as you slip 5 quid to a guy in another country, and he’ll tell you he’s stayed celibate.
Is there money in that? Because I could make some bank.
That metaphor doesn’t apply. CO2 in the atmosphere is fungible. Taking a gram out after putting a gram in works out to zero.
Where it’s a problem is that they aren’t actually taking a gram out. Regulatory oversight is little to nothing. That has allowed companies to pay a token amount into offset programs and pretend the problem is solved. What they’re paying is far too cheap to accomplish what they claim.
Burns, burns, burns, the lake fire…
…cuz the ring lit the lake and it was full of oil.
Cuyahoga River – “at least 13 fires” …
If you Google anything the first results are sponsored links.
…and that should tell you all you need to know.
Carbon Capture and Storage has proven highly effective at injecting taxpayer dollars straight into politicians’ pockets
That’s a half truth.
A lot of money was funneled directly into corporate profits and the pockets of carbon sequestration speculators.
Geologist here. I work in Oil and Gas, but not for producers. Service side. We’ve helped with the geology of a handful of carbon capture injection wells this year. They get funded by the majors, but operated by someone else, and they drill them on site of a factory or plant that produces a lot of carbon. That way there is a local site to inject the carbon they capture as a by product od the industrial activity. Pretty cool stuff I’d you look past a quick internet search and make assumptions.
Out of curiosity, how long can we inject captured carbon underground for? Do we have a good estimation of the long-term ramifications?
Long term ramifications… If you store carbon for millions of years underground, eventually a future species will tap it as a fuel source.
Probably not. It’s likely carbon that is pretty much completely oxidized since OP said it was captured as a byproduct of industrial activity (after all, why would you sequester carbon that still had useful energy?) If you store fully oxidized carbon underground for millions of years, it will still be fully oxidized when it’s dug up because that carbon’s most stable state (especially in an oxygen-rich environment like Earth). The only reason fossil fuels exist is because the carbon was sequestered in a mostly reduced (aka energy-rich aka unstable) state, so you get a mess of goopy hydrocarbons after millions of years. If you try the same thing with CO2, you just get limestone.
As much as I agree with the implication that O&G companies latch on to every potential carbon sink as a way to greenwash themselves, carbon capture does have merits.
However, the only ones who can currently utilize carbon capture on a significant scale are the ones who produce a lot of carbon to begin with. Technology will have to advance drastically for it to be a carbon sink effective enough to offset emission to the point where emission cuts can be scaled down.
Source: Last year I was involved in surveyon an area that was planned for huge-scale carbon storage after capture.
One industry that is really suited for CC is steel production. Making steel from iron is basically removing the carbon from the iron ore, and that has been done since the 1800s by introducing oxygen to the molten iron. This creates a pillar of carbon dioxide from a very localized point and should, if the technology existed and was used, be easy to capture. The Swedish steel manufacturer SSAB accounts for 11% of the national Swedish emissions, and 10% of Finland’s. It’s not negligible. And steel is used every day, everywhere, and for everything. Every other metal pales in comparison. It’s a gigantic industry. And it’s perfect for carbon capture.
it’s much more nuanced than that though.
naunce? in this economy?
Who here is googling with sponsored search results?
Yup. And they’ve been working on it for 20 years, and have yet to illustrate any scale that would effect the problem.
Okay? And how are we supposed to deal with the emissions currently in the atmosphere? Even if we abandon all technologies that generate greenhouse gases overnight, we still have shit in the atmosphere warming the planet.
The most compelling strategy I’ve heard is biochar. You immolate organic matter in a medium like nitrogen so you don’t get carbon dioxide, and then you bury the char or use it as fertilizer. The char is relatively stable so shouldn’t create much in the way of carbon dioxide once it’s formed, and because you make it in an oxygen-less atmosphere you don’t get more greenhouse gases from making it.
biochar is awesome
Absolutely, I also think Biochar is very promising as one way to recapture atmospheric CO2 and to compensate further emissions.
While I understood the production process to be a little different, the benefits of Biochar can’t be ignored.
- low in energy consumption
- low in recourse cost
- very good scalable
- no hidden science or process
- the stored carbon can be used as a soil amendment
The process may be a bit more complex than I understood, but my understanding is that the gist of it is to “burn” plant stuff in a way that doesn’t create carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One way of doing that is to use a chamber flooded with nitrogen or similar inert gas. No oxygen means carbon can’t bind to two oxygen atoms to create carbon dioxide.
I’m confused, how can you ‘burn’ anything without oxygen? Burn literally means to oxidize
That’s why it’s in quotes. You’re subjecting it to high heat, which would normally cause it to burn, but because there’s no oxygen it chars instead.
I don’t understand. Biomass already isnt CO2. Why do we take an extra step?
Because when biomass rots, it creates CO2. By charring it you’re making the carbon more stable and less likely to become CO2 in the future. It also won’t rot when charred.
So how do we produce biomass? Plant more trees? Which we already do. Then in how many year we cut it down and biochar it instead of using it reporposing it for something else? I’m kind of failing to see the benefit. Just seems like an alternative that isn’t really any better than some of the other good alternatives.
Make algae ponds, harvest the algae, dry it, char it, bury it. Algae sucks up carbon dioxide like crazy, the downside being that it releases the carbon when it starts to rot. By charring and burying it, you’re helping to make sure that carbon doesn’t re-enter the atmosphere.
Peat, too! It’s one of the best carbon sinks we currently have.
Ah. I didn’t think of algae. Might be a good reason to harvest all the algae blooms from the fertilizer run off.
Hey, look at us, we are planting 2 bn trees that are ALL THE SAME.
None of the methods they present as solutions are even close to being viable. The ones that do look promising, however, are where they bind the CO2 to tailings.
This binary thinking from activists really annoys me.
How is that binary?
You seriously need to ask? You do not want to actually understand how it may work, how much it may cost, how realistic it is? And instead you would use “energy companies = bad” and if they also want to participate in carbon capture, then it is ALL you need to know and reject the idea simply based on this. You do not see this as binary??
Companies = bad
Or a bit more nuanced: Under a capitalist system, the first order of business is to make money. That does not have to be bad a priori, but with the given scenario of carbon capture, the meme points out the fact, that it is mostly greenwashing. Does that mean carbon capture is bad? No. Is it the best way to tackle climate change? Absolutely not. Does it make them money and delay actual action to combat the climate crisis? Yes.
But that wouldn’t be a meme, would it?
Making a meme does not mean that you have to do it as a one-bit stupidity. That’s not a valid excuse.
There is no single technology that will tackle climate change, it will/does require combined approach and carbon capture quite possible have a role there to play too. And as for companies making money, they do make monies on solar, wind, electrical cars, and they will make money on carbon capture, hopefully. If there is no money to be made, then it would be a very good indication that the idea is dead on arrival.
System change, not climate change
yeah, no one’s getting distracted
Search results are dependant on who is searching. But still:
When you use DuckDuckGo the first result is wikipedia.
When you use Google the first results are corporations.
When you use Bing the first result is a corporation, then Wikipedia.
Brave search gives an AI summary of carbon capture, an investment page, one of the corp pages, and then a breakdown on why ‘carbon capture’ is a misleading tactic.
Edit: All this to say, maybe stop using Google.
You forgot to mention the crypto spam on Brave lol
Tried it and it’s true. Also tried on DDG and I got mostly actual information. Use DDG.
They want someone else to do it (probably the taxpayer) and carbon capture means they think they don’t really have to change what they do.
